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THE BEING OF GOD 

AS UNITY AND 

TRINITY 



^^"^ 



P. H. STEENSTRA, D. D. 

PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT LITERATURE AND EXEGESIS IN THE 
EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 







BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1891 



^ 



n^ 



Copyright, 1891, 
By p. H. STEENSTRA. 

All rights reserved. 




The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company. 



NOTE, 



The occasion by which these lectures were called 
forth is stated on the first page. Their publication is 
due in part to the strongly urged wishes of many 
of the young men who heard them, and in part 
to considerations which it is not necessary here to 
explain, but among which the vanity of authorship 
had no part. That they may aid some minds to 
adjust new forms of thought to the old truth is 
my highest hope, and will be my best reward. 

P. H. S. 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 

January 24, 1891. 



CONTENTS. 
♦ 

PAGE 

LECTURE I. 
Preliminajry Fundamental Questions 1 

LECTURE 11. 

Arguments for the Existence of God — the Cosmo- 
logical AND Teleological 26 

LECTURE IIL 
The Moral and Ontological Arguments 63 

LECTURE IV. 
Recapitulation. — Transition to the Attributes . . 89 

LECTURE V. 

The Omnipresence, Eternity, and Omnipotence of 
God 112 

LECTURE VL 
The Omniscience, Holiness, and Love of God . . .140 

LECTURE Vn. 

The Christian Consciousness in Relation to the Doc- 
trine OF the Trinity 159 



VI CONTENTS. 

LECTURE Vin. 
The Trinity : its Historical, Revelation . . . . . 188 

LECTURE IX. 
The Trinity: its Interpretative Revelation . , . 217 



LECTURE X. 

The Speculative Construction of the Doctrine of 
THE Trinity . . , 246 



THE BEING OF GOD 

AS UNITY AND TRINITY. 



LECTURE I. 

PEELIMINARY FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS. 

The present is the first of three courses of lec- 
tures projected for the current year by the Trus- 
tees of the School.^ The intention, as I under- 
stand it, is that the three courses shall cover, 
as far as may be, the three main divisions of the 
ancient Christian creeds, relating respectively to 
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy 
Ghost. With this understanding, I interpret the 
theme assigned to me, viz., " The Doctrine of the 
Trinity, with especial reference to the Father," 
as calling for a consideration of the chief topics 
involved in the first part of the creeds. In the 

^ The occasion for providing- these lecture-courses was the ill- 
ness of Dean Gray, the professor of Systematic Divinity in the 
Cambridge School. It was hoped that a year's rest would re- 
store him to health and duty ; but before the opening' of the 
scholastic year 1889-90, during" which the lectures were delivered, 
he had already passed from earthly toil to heavenly rest. 



2 THE BEING OF GOD 

shorter, tlie so - called Apostles' Creed, this part 
reads : "I believe in God the Father Almighty, 
Maker of heaven and earth." In what is com- 
monly called the Nicene Creed its form is enlarged 
but not essentially changed : "I believe in one 
God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and 
earth, and of all things visible and invisible." 

The phrase " I believe " has for its object not 
one part of the creed, but all three, and is there- 
fore repeated at the beginning of the third, after 
the intervention of the long second part. Its con- 
sideration belongs, therefore, to every course as 
much as to any one in particular. The importance 
of considering it at all depends chiefly on the view 
taken of the nature of the Trto-rt?, faith or belief, 
here professed. If it were to be understood of 
fides justificans^ then an inquiry into its nature 
would be of peculiar and far-reaching importance. 
But in that case it would find its proper place in 
connection with the third part of the creed. The 
truth, however, is that the ancient symbols are 
statements of doctrinal belief; so that the words 
" I believe " can scarcely be regarded as other or 
more than a declaration of intellectual assent. 
When the early creeds originated, the distinction 
between dogmatic belief and that spiritual atti- 
tude of man toward God to which we more espe- 
cially restrict the word " faith," however distinctly 



INTBODUCTOBY 3 

felt in the Christian life, was not made in theory. 
Taken, then, in the sense of what may be called 
an oral subscription to the doctrine of the creed, 
the formula " I believe " requires no special treat- 
ment. 

The first subject, therefore, properly presented 
to lis is God. The creeds bid us say, "1 be- 
lieve in God." Historically considered, this is not 
so much a profession of belief that God exists, as 
a rejection of all false gods. Nevertheless, the ex- 
istence of God is the necessary basis and starting- 
point of both religion and theology. But while 
the former holds it as a datum of Christian con- 
sciousness, and thus of immediate certitude, the 
latter must treat it as a subject of thought and 
reflection, and seek for it a ground of certitude in 
reason. For theology, scientific theology, is not 
merely a systematic exhibit of what we believe, but 
its rational justification. The Christian mind can- 
not permanently rest satisfied with the intuitions 
of the heart, i. e., with faith ; it longs to see and 
know in its own way. And he assuredly is no 
true friend of faith who would suppress this long- 
ing, or discourage the attempt to satisfy it. The 
intellect of man is as truly and integrally a part of 
the divine image after which he was made, as his 
spiritual nature. The power to think and the ne- 
cessity to exercise it belong to his being as inalien- 



4 THE BEIXG OF GOD 

ably and eternally as the msight of conscience. 
They are mutually complementary — acting and 
reactino' on each other. Neither can be neoiected 
without injury to the other. Both alike must be 
fed and exercised, if the whole man is to advance 
and grow in well-proportioned s}TQmetiy. TThat 
is all the bigotiy. fanaticism, and intolerance, from 
which Christianity has suffered so fearfully within 
the house of its friends, but the result of a distorted 
development of the faith-side of human nature — 
distorted for the very reason that it left the thought- 
side uncultivated? The leaders in the spiritual up- 
building of the Church — have they not always been 
those who were also the leaders of her thinking? 
True, the gTeat majorit}' of the Christian people 
cannot rise to the hio-her levels of thoug-ht : but 
the whole atmosphere of Christian worship and 
teachino' is made one of intellectual enlio-htenment 
as well as spiritual culture for them also, by those 
who can. Hence that age and that church uni- 
formly produce the highest results in Christian 
character in which faith and thought go hand in 
hand. The mind desires and seeks to grasp in 
thought the contents of its Christian faith, hope, 
and experience, not primarily to convert its faith- 
assurance into intellectual certitude, but much 
rather to become more and more fully conscious of 
the wealth that is its own, and to add to its love 



THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 5 

and gratitude the noble tribute of intelligent ado- 
ration. 

Theology therefore begins with the evidences of 
the existence of God. Not to quell doubt, but 
to know ; and not to know the bare fact of the 
divine existence, but whatever else that fact may 
reveal. For since God is the ground of all that is, 
the thought of God, if we could but exhaustively 
think it, is the sum of all thought ; the knowledge 
that God is, by the only way in which it is for us 
attainable, itself includes (as we shall find) much 
of our highest knowledge of what he is. 

But before proceeding with our subject, it is well 
to hear their reasons who tell us that we are un- 
dertaking the impossible. This warning comes 
from various sides; philosophers, scientists, and 
theologians unite in uttering it. It is enforced by 
two closely related allegations: the one broadly 
asserts that it is impossible for man to attain to 
any true knowledge of God ; the other is content 
with declaring that the existence of God cannot 
be established or proved by any processes of the 
understanding. Neither of these positions is ne- 
cessarily destructive of faith in God. The second 
is held by numerous thoroughly theistic theolo- 
gians ; and even the first has been put forth as the 
very panacea for philosophic unbelief, and the best 



6 THE BEING OF GOD 

means of leading men to the faith of the Church. 
But they leave the prospect of mental satisfaction 
so hopeless that it may well be doubted whether 
the confidence of faith can continue to maintain 
itself. In any case, if they are true, our wings are 
cli]3ped before we attempt our flight ; if not true, 
or even if not proven, they leave us at least the 
hope of success. 

We turn then first to the contention that it is 
impossible for us to reach true knowledge of God. 
It would be highly serviceable at this point to 
inquire into the nature of knowledge, as to which 
mistaken conceptions are not rare ; but it must suf- 
fice for the present to say that to know God means 
to have intellectual concepts, ideas, or notions, of 
his being and character corresponding to the facts. 
The impossibility of obtaining these is argued 
especially by what is called " the doctrine of the 
relativity of human knowledge." This doctrine 
owes its elaboration chiefly to impulses furnished 
by modern physical science, and is supposed to be 
peculiarly scientific and unanswerable, and to give 
the death-blow to all attempts to arrive at a 
rational knowledge of God. It is on this account 
that I feel constrained to devote a few paragraphs 
to its exposition, although twenty entire lectures 
would be needed to deal with it fully. It is not 
stated alike by all who use it. Indeed, it assumes 



THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 7 

very different forms, and is combined with radi- 
cally different doctrines, in the hands of Auguste 
Comte, Sir William Hamilton, John Stuart Mill, 
Herbert Spencer, and others. But it always in- 
volves and starts with the proposition that we know 
nothing of objects in themselves, but only of their 
relations, first towards our cognitive faculties, and 
secondly towards each other. Knowledge is know- 
ledge not of things but of relations ; hence the 
phrase, relativity of knowledge. As to the rela^ 
tions of external objects towards ourselves (that is, 
towards our cognitive faculties), we only know that 
they give rise in us to certain perceptions or sensa- 
tions. When I see a tree, I know only that there 
is an object that produces a number of peculiar 
modifications in my consciousness through the me- 
dium of my sense of sight. When I hear the wind 
rustling among its branches and foliage, all I know 
is that something produces another set of impres- 
sions through my sense of hearing. Even when I 
lay my hand on its bark, I know only that here is 
something that produces a peculiar form of the 
sensation of touch or feeling. Beyond these sensa- 
tions my knowledge does not go. In fact, when I 
spoke of the tree as an object, implying that it has 
real existence, I went too far. So far as my per- 
ceptive faculties go, they do not and cannot assure 
me that there is a tree at all. I have sensations ; 



8 THE BEING OF GOD 

that I knew ; but the producing cause of those sen- 
sations may be God's power immediately exerting 
itself, as Berkeley thought, or it may be some hid- 
den property of my own being that brings them out. 
All I know is the sensation. Whether this paper 
exists, whether this table, whether you, whether the 
whole physical universe is or is not, I cannot learn 
from eye, or ear, touch, or any other sense. Now, 
if this be a true account of what our senses can tell 
us, — and I am bound to add that I believe it is 
true, — it follows that unless we have another 
source of knowledge than that of sense-perception, 
we can have no knowledge of any form of existence 
except our own. How then can we know that God 
exists, to say nothing of what he is ? If we cannot 
know the least, how can we know the greatest ? 

Sir William Hamilton's philosophy adds still an- 
other difficulty, — a difficulty, so serious that it is 
hard to see how he maintains the philosophic real- 
ism he professes. Admit for the moment that the 
tree has a real existence ; still the knowledge ob- 
tained of it through perception is unreliable. We 
know it not " as it is, but as it seems to us to be." 
It is, or at least may be, materially modified by 
the medium (the atmosphere) through which the 
eye views it ; and the eye itself may contribute 
elements of its own, — elements, e. ^., such as a 
differently constructed eye would see differently 



THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 9 

and perhaps more truly. Tlie result is that the 
supposed knowledge imparted in perception is, or 
may be, drawn from three sources : first, from the 
tree itself ; secondly, from the atmosphere through 
which it is seen ; thirdly, from the seeing eye. 
Hamilton himself illustrates his doctrine by sup- 
posing that if the whole knowledge of an object be 
twelve, four are contributed by the object itself, 
four by the medium that intervenes between the 
object and the percipient organ, and four by this 
organ. What must be inferred from this, if not 
that we cannot be sure of knowing anything ? If 
two thirds of our supposed knowledge may be made 
up of spurious contributions, why not eleven 
twelfths? And if any part of the information 
gained in perception be spurious, how are we to 
distinguish that part from the genuine ? Practi- 
cally nothing but unqualified nescience remains. 

The same conclusion seems to follow when we 
consider the other group of relations cognizable by 
us — those of objects to each other. All our know- 
ledge of external objects, apart from that gained 
in perception, such as it is, begins and ends with 
points of resemblance or difference between them. 
It is, always, not insight into what the object is in 
itself, but mere classification. Let us go back to 
the tree, and ask. What is it ? It is not an animal, 
for it does not move from the place it occupies, and 



10 THE BEING OF GOD 

has not any of tlie means of locomotion found in 
the class of objects we call animals. On the other 
hand, it is not a rock, for it is an organic object, 
which a rock is not. It feeds and grows: and 
when awake during the summer, the sap flows 
through the trunk and all the branches. There is 
but one class of things it can belong to — trees. 
Looking again, we find that it is not a pine, nor a 
maple, but one of that class of trees we call oaks. 
Think about the tree, and reason about it as you 
will, you will never be able to say anything more 
than It is not like that, but it is like this. Say, it 
is wood : but what is wood ? It is not metal, it is 
not soil, it is not water ; it is something we meet 
with frequently, and which we classify as wood. 
The oak is hard wood. What is hard ? Not soft. 
Hard and soft are merely correlative terms. Oak 
is hard wood compared with pine or even maple. 
Once again, nothing but classification, or putting 
one object in relation to another ; no knowledge of 
the thing itself, in and by itself. How, then, can 
you know the Infinite, — you who cannot even 
know a tree ? Assuming that he exists, — and you 
certainl}^ cannot prove it, — you can only say, He 
is not like this, nor like that, nor like anything 
else ; and put him in a class by himself, entitled 
the Unknowable. 

I have brought these principles before you, not 



THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 11 

to refute nor to deny them. Deny them I cannot, 
at least not without a great deal of qualification. 
To refute them, so far as that is possible, would 
lead us too far afield. In one sense we are bound 
to admit that our knowledge is relative, — relative 
to our faculties and mental limitations. Nor can 
we claim to have immediate and positive knowledge 
of substance apart from qualities. What I wish 
to do is to point out the scope of this doctrine. 
We hear much of agnosticism; and it is always 
in matters of religion. The inference naturally 
suggests itself, and is undoubtedly drawn by many, 
that religious truth differs from physical and math- 
ematical truth as to its ultimate basis. Sometimes 
the very persons who talk with the utmost assur- 
ance and certitude about the composition of the 
sun, the origin of the planetary system, or the evo- 
lution of organic life, when they come to religion, 
i. e., to man's relations to the Infinite, say. We 
know nothing, we can know nothing, about it ; hu- 
man knowledge is relative, — it can never reach ab- 
solute existence. Now if such persons were as good 
logicians as perhaps they are scientists, they would 
see and acknowledge that the doctrine of the rela- 
tivity of knowledge applies to all knowledge : that 
when they say, e. g., the phenomena presented by 
the sun are such as to suggest that it is composed 
of such and such material, that, on their own doc- 



12 THE BEING OF GOD 

trine, leaves them just as much in the dark about 
the sun in itself as ever they were, — nay, more, that 
even of the phenomena, which are all they know, 
they can only say. Such they appear to us ; whether 
they are so in reality, or may not appear very dif- 
ferently to other intelligent beings, if such there 
be, we do not know. In short, whether any part of 
our science is ohjectively true, we cannot affirm ; we 
only know that it is true to ws, — true in relation 
to our human faculties. 

Mr. Herbert Spencer, far enough from assuming 
postulates which he can possibly do without, feels 
the sweeping destructiveness of the doctrine of the 
relativity of knowledge so keenly that he boldly 
argues that this doctrine itself involves the reality 
of absolute being. " Every one of the arguments " 
(he says ^) " by which the relativity of our know- 
ledge is demonstrated, distinctly postulates the pos- 
itive existence beyond the relative. To say that 
we cannot know the Absolute, is, by implication, 
to affirm that there is an absolute. In the very 
denial of our power to learn zohat the Absolute is, 
there lies hidden the assumption that it is. . . . 
It is rigorously impossible to conceive that our 
knowledge is a knowledge of Appearances only, 
without at the same time conceiving a Keality of 
which they are appearances ; for appearance with- 
1 First Principles, p. 83, Appleton's edit. 



THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 13 

out reality is unthinkable." He speaks of " our 
firm belief in objective reality," — i. e. our firm be- 
lief that when our eyes see a tree, there is a real 
object that affects them, — and says of this belief 
that " metaphysical criticisms cannot for a moment 
shake " it.^ That is to say, without acknowledging 
it, and contrary to the fundamental principles of 
his philosophy, he takes refuge in what are com- 
monly called " primary truths," " necessary ideas," 
" irresistible convictions." But even thus the fell 
swoop of the doctrine is not to be evaded. It is 
true, he admits inferences drawn from perceptions 
as reliable guides to truth, — as who does not ? — 
but on what ground? Though my mind be so 
constituted that I cannot but believe that two is 
more than one, who can assure me that this belief 
is equally necessary to the inhabitants of other 
worlds, if such there be ? Though we may all 
agree on the laws of logic, and say that such and 
such modes of reasoning necessarily lead to true 
results, who shall assure us that even our algebra 
and geometry are not masses of absurdity to the 
people of Mars or Jupiter? In one word, the 
question raised by the doctrine of the relativity of 
knowledge, grounded on philosophic sensational- 
ism, is neither more nor less than the question. 
How do we know that anything is true, — that 

1 First Princ, p. 93. 



14 THE BEING OF GOD 

knowledge of any kind or degree is possible ? 
The astronomer's most carefully worked-out train 
of reasoning depends for its truth on the validity, 
first of logical processes, and secondly of the ax- 
ioms and postulates that lie at the foundation of 
ail mathematics ; and who can show that these are 
anything but relative truths ? 

This is the bottom question of this doctrine ; and 
you see that it covers the whole field of possible or 
impossible knowledge. Agnosticism is an egregious 
self-deception when it limits itself to religion.^ 
And the answer to it may be indicated in few 
words. We cannot prove the absolute and univer- 
sal truth of what we accept as axioms, postulates, 
or primary truths. We cannot demonstrate the 
universal validity of the syllogism, or any of the 
laws of reasoning. We must assume that the 
universe is constructed on honest principles ; that 
there is truth, and that we can attain it. On this 
assumption we set out, and then find its verification 
at every step. The astronomer predicts an eclipse, 
and the event confirms the truth of the principles 
on which he reasons. Experience shows every day 
in myriads of instances that we do get at the 
truth of nature, and that therefore our logic and 
our primary principles, albeit we cannot apriorily 

1 Cf. on this point tlie acute volume of Artliur James Balfour, 
Defense of Philosophic Doubt. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE 15 

prove them true, are certified as true by their re- 
sults. Can we consistently reject them as falla- 
cious when they exercise themselves on matters be- 
yond nature, simply because their verification — 
by no means wanting — is less direct and compul- 
sory? All knowledge does start with sense-per- 
ception — that we admit ; but why must inferential 
reasoning, implicitly trusted within the bounds of 
nature, be traduced as a deceitful ignis fatuus 
when it leads to conclusions concerning what lies 
beyond ? 

Thus far I have treated the doctrine of the rela- 
tivity of knowledge in what, for the sake of distinc- 
tion, may be termed its physical-science form ; 
but it appears also in a more abstract, dialectic 
habit. In this form it sets out with the conception 
of God as the Absolute and Infinite, and disports 
itself in a boundless field of what I cannot but re- 
gard as word- jugglery. Especially is this the case 
with the term "absolute," which each one may define 
in his own way, according to the needs of his phi- 
losophy. Mansel's " Limits of Religious Thought " 
made us of the elder generation now living nause- 
atingly familiar with the capabilities of the argu- 
ment in this shape, although it was done in the 
supposed interests of faith. If the Absolute Being 
is to be regarded as a being who cannot stand in 



16 THE BEING OF GOD 

relations of any kind to any other being or even to 
himself, then, of course, he cannot be known ; not 
only because we can only know relations, but also 
because, the moment he is known, he stands to the 
knower in the relation of the known. And by 
parity of reasoning he cannot know himself; for 
that would imply a relation of himself to himself. 
But is this reasoning, or is it mere word-play ? Is 
it not assumed here that whatever may be truly af- 
firmed of one relation is applicable to all? and 
that relatedness, whatever else it may include, al- 
ways implies a limitation imposed from without? 
Is the relation of knowing subject and known ob- 
ject of the same or similar nature and import as 
the relation of master and slave, of restrainer and 
restrained, of conscious mind to unconscious na- 
ture ? When A knows B, makes him the object 
of thought and contemplation, is B, though per- 
haps utterly unconscious of A and his thought, 
thereby in any way affected, changed, hindered, or 
limited ? Why, then, should our knowing God be 
incompatible with the divine nature or inconsistent 
with any true idea of God ? If this flow necessarily 
from the contents of the term " absolute," by what 
right or reason is that term applied to God ? Cer- 
tainly, the idea of the God in whose existence the 
Christian believes is not by him conceived as abso- 
lute in that sense. Conceive of the Absolute, not 



THE INFINITE AS UNKNOWABLE 17 

as the necessarily unrelated, but as the not neces- 
sarily related, as the always Independent, i. e. as 
the One who has his cause and source of existence, 
not outside of himself, but in himself, — and that 
difficulty vanishes. 

Similar difficulties are found in the idea of God 
as the Infinite. From the time of Plato down to 
Hamilton and Mansel, the Infinite, as such, has 
been regarded by many philosophers as unknow- 
able. It is said that we cannot conceive of the in- 
finite, and hence cannot know it. Now, if that 
means — and it can scarcely mean anything else — 
that we cannot form a mental image of infinitude, 
be it time, space, or being, it is true. But even 
Mr. Spencer, although he seems to use the words 
" inconceivable " and " unimaginable " as synony- 
mous,^ allows of what he not inaptly designates 
" symbolic conceptions " as useful and necessary, 
notwithstanding their inadequacy as images.^ Or 
must we say that we can know nothing that we can- 
not depict in the imagination ? How, then, can we 
think or know time ? All our abstract and generic 
conceptions are thoughts of which we can form 
no mental images. Who can conjure up a men- 
tal picture of wisdom, evil, mankind, vertebrates ? 
Yet we think thoughts in those words, and we 

1 Cf. Balfour, p. 196. 
^ First Princ.,-p.2Qb. 



18 THE BEING OF GOD 

know the contents of the thoughts, and can com- 
municate them. Why, then, can we not think the 
Infinite ? If to think necessarily implies the ac- 
tual and simultaneous perception by the conscious- 
ness of all contents of the thought, then indeed we 
cannot; but does it? When I say. The year is 
drawing to a close, do I think nothing unless every 
day and every hour of the year is distinctly present 
to my consciousness ? It is true that I could think 
over the year in such a manner as to bring every 
day, hour, and minute successively before my men- 
tal vision ; but it would take another year to do it 
in, just as Hamilton says that it would take eter- 
nity in which to " construe to the mind " an infi- 
nite whole, the possibility of knowing which he 
therefore denies.^ But if I can think the thought 
" the year " only in this way, then I practically 
can think it as little as, according to Hamilton, I 
can think the Infinite, — which would annihilate 
all thinking. In fact, however, we can think the 
Infinite ; and that not only as a negative thought, 
but quite positively. The form of the word is in- 
deed negative, but the thought is as positive as 
that expressed in the words " omnipotent " and 
" omniscient." The positiveness of the thoughts 
" infinite time " and " infinite space " is, it seems to 
me, very evident from the fact that every effort to 
1 Wight's Ham. Phil, p. 354. 



CAN IT BE DEMONSTRATED? 19 

think of a limit to tliem fails. Carry the idea of 
duration backward or forward until the mind wea- 
ries in the effort ; still you cannot stop. Why not ? 
Because prior to your efforts you had the idea of 
infinite time in your mind, and you know that you 
have not yet fulfilled its demands. You had it as 
a model, and that model tells you that there are 
no limits. The infinitude of time and space are 
not ideas given by experience, or logically deduced 
from what experience gives. They are given in 
the constitution of the mind. Therefore, so far as 
the infinitude of God is concerned, albeit we can 
neither picture it nor fully embrace it in thought, 
it erects no absolute barrier against our knowing 
God, although it does make our knowledge una- 
voidably incomplete. 

Let us pass on to the second allegation above 
adduced. God, we are assured, exists, and may 
be known ; but his existence cannot be demon- 
strated by the reason, — it is given. But given 
how, and where ? Some theologians would reply, 
In the Scriptures. They may not deny the possi- 
bility of other proof ; and in so far as they do not, 
their opinion does not fall under this head. But 
they probably do ; for, as a class, their regard for 
the powers of the understanding in the region of 
metaphysical truth is not great. Jealousy for the 



^0 THE BEING OF GOD 

honor of revelation gives rise to this unfortunate 
bias. The effort to prove the existence of God is 
at all events useless in their view. However, 
whether they would say impossible or useless, their 
position in either case is not without direct bearing 
on the point before us, and may therefore right- 
fully be adverted to here. They claim that the 
sacred Scriptures reveal the existence of God. But 
the Scriptures themselves appeal to proofs outside 
of themselves. St. Paul, for example, says : " For 
the invisible things of Him, since the creation of 
the world, are clearly seen, being perceived through 
the things that are made, even his everlasting 
power and divinity." And hence the heathen, 
though they have not the Scriptures, do have some 
knowledge of God, — sufficient to render them ex- 
cuseless. The conclusive consideration, however, 
is that the divine authority of the Scriptures can 
in reason be grounded only on their demonstrated 
divine origin ; so that the argument, if argument it 
can be called, moves in a vicious circle, in that it 
assumes the existence of God in order to establish 
the authority of the Scriptures, and then uses the 
Scriptures to establish what has already been as- 
sumed. I am not denying that, if the Bible were 
placed in the hands of a heathen, it could enlarge 
and correct his defective notion of God ; nay, more, 
— if the case were supposable of a sound mind 



CAN IT BE DEMONSTRATED? 21 

utterly destitute of any idea of God, the Scrip- 
tures could put such a mind in possession of a very 
lofty conception of God, inferior only to that which 
has been attained by Christian theology through 
ages of divinely guided experience and thinking. 
But to impart an idea is not to prove its objective 
truth. The mind thus instructed, even while it ac- 
cepted the idea as carrying in itself the highest 
notes of truth short of absolute necessity, would 
stiU ask for proof, and be restless till it found it. 
All this is so clear that the appeal to the Bible at 
this point can only be made by such as are hostile 
to scientific theology, and regard dogmatic theol- 
ogy as merely a systematic exhibition of biblical 
teaching. 

Very different is the contention of those theolo- 
gians who deny the possibility of rationally prov- 
ing the existence of God on the ground that " its 
very certainty precludes demonstration ; " and that 
belief in it is already present in the mind that at- 
tempts it, and '^ vitiates all the reasoning in such 
demonstrations." 1 That a preceding conviction 
often leads to loose and inaccurate reasoning in 
support of it cannot be doubted ; but to conclude 
that therefore such a conviction cannot possibly be 
logically demonstrated would itself be a specimen 
of very loose reasoning. Does not the author 

^ Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, p. 185 f . 



22 THE BEING OF GOB 

whose words I just now quoted himself suggest an 
argument of utmost force and value when, but a 
few lines farther on, he says, " Of all existence, the 
correlate in reason is Absolute Being, — i. e. God " ? 
Very true, I say; but suppose I propound this 
sentence to the agnostic, will he not at once reply. 
Prove it ? And if I cannot so explicate the con- 
tents of the concepts, existence, correlate, reason, 
and absolute being, as to make the truth of the 
statement apparent, what is its value, either for 
him or for me ? Or, if I can and do, is not that 
a demonstration that for reason the absolute being 
exists ? 

I do not deny that the idea of God is an intui- 
tive, necessary idea of the reason. But the neces- 
sity of all necessary ideas is not equally obvious. 
Some carry it on their faces, so to speak ; others 
allow it to be seen only upon the closest scrutiny. 
If the idea of God be among the latter, to show that 
fact will be to prove it, or, if you please, to prove 
that it neither needs nor admits of " syllogistic 
proof." That it is not one of the former seems to 
my mind very clear. I attach no value to the oft- 
repeated assertion that savage tribes have been 
found without any idea of God whatsoever. Ac- 
cepting its truth, it might be considered as proof 
that such tribes had not yet fully risen to the level 
of true humanity, or had by retrogression fallen far 



CAN IT BE DEMON Sf BATED? 23 

below it. It is, however, far more probable that 
tbe reporter, whether traveler or missionary, failed 
to elicit the exact truth. Be that as it may, it 
is certain that the idea is found in very different 
degrees of perfection. Its import is realized in 
forms of expression and acts of worship so far 
asunder as to obscure their relationship to a com- 
mon thought. It is always and everywhere a grow- 
ing idea, keeping pace upon the whole with the de- 
velopment of the intellectual powers. It never 
appears with the full force of an idea or conviction 
which no one can in good faith deny or doubt. No 
sane mind can doubt that every effect has a cause, 
that the whole is greater than one of its parts, or 
that a body can be in but one place in the same 
instant of time. These are propositions that only 
need to be presented to the mind to be recognized 
as necessarily true. No logical processes, other 
than mere definition of words, intervene, or can in- 
tervene, between the conception of them and their 
acceptance as true. The illiterate mind may possi- 
bly fail to understand the terms " cause and effect," 
or the technical element in the assertion that the 
whole is greater than the part ; but the liwment 
it does understand, it assents. It can no m@re 
think it possible that a part is equal to the whole 
than it can believe that pleasure and pain are iden- 
tical. But it is possible to say, " There is no God," 



24 THE BEING OF GOB 

without feeling that the assertion cannot be true. 
The " fool " may doubt and tremble while he says 
it, but he is not self-convicted of uttering an ab- 
surdity. The idea of God, though necessary, is 
not immediately self-evident. The very fact that 
men are always seeking for arguments to prove it 
shows this. For it never occurs to any one to seek 
for proof of what he cannot but believe. 

Others describe the idea of God as a moral intu- 
ition or conviction, or as the utterance of the faith- 
principle. Exactly what is meant by this is not 
easily ascertainable, if at all. There is no doubt 
that the moral nature is strongly operative in bring- 
ing the idea of God home to the consciousness of 
men as an effective moral regulative. But whether 
the moral faculty can either discover or receive 
ideas without the intervention of the reason is 
quite another question, on which I shall not enter. 
Enough for my present purpose that, as a moral 
conviction, the idea of God is not antecedently de- 
barred from the possibility of rational demonstra- 
tion. The moral, no matter how immediate and 
fundamental, ever seeks expression and confirma- 
tion in terms of the intellectual, and conversely. 
In beings both moral and intellectual, the two 
sides cannot permanently rest in unmediated sepa- 
rateness. Both seek to realize their perfect coales- 



CAN IT BE DEMON STB ATED? 25 

cence in unity. No one can be satisfied with logi- 
cally reached conclusions that contradict his moral 
instincts, or even fail to manifest their harmony 
with them. But just as little can he be content 
with moral convictions, the rationality of which 
cannot be made out. To assert that the idea of 
God is a moral intuition, and as such incapable of 
rational demonstration, is to deny the unity of our 
nature, and to make it the prey of miserable inter- 
nal discord. 

One other phase of the same general objection 
might engage us ; but it is better to dismiss it for 
the present with a mere mention. It is said that 
no arguments yet brought forward to prove the ex- 
istence of God are sound and conclusive. Whether 
this be true, or how far it is true, will manifest it- 
self as we pass them in review. 



LECTUEE II. 

AEGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD — THE 
COSMOLOGICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL. 

The arguments most frequently adduced to 
prove the existence of God are five in number, 
respectively designated as the ontological, the cos- 
mological, the teleological, the moral, and the his- 
torical. Most writers who treat them do so in the 
order in which they have just been named. The 
advantage of so doing is that the discussion of the 
ontological argument at the outset furnishes a num- 
ber of determinations by which the others gain a 
wider reach than they possess in themselves. For 
these arguments are not to be regarded as five 
wholly distinct and mutually independent lines of 
reasoning, leading severally to the same immedi- 
ate result. That is true only within very nar- 
row limits ; beyond these limits, they are comple- 
mentary of each other ; and of no one of them 
can it be said that by itself it establishes the exist- 
ence of a being containing in himself all that our 
idea of God demands. But there is also, and I 
think greater, advantage in following the order in 



GROWTH OF THE IDEA OF GOD 27 

whicli we may suppose the arguments to have been 
originally thought out or discovered. This will 
help us to estimate the exact weight of each, taken 
by itself, and (what is of more importance) will 
enable us to trace the gradual growth of the idea 
of God, to the successive stages of which the sev- 
eral arguments more or less closely correspond, 
and which gives life and inherent probability to 
logical processes which in books of systematic the- 
ology too often appear abstract and dead. 

If the allusion just made to the historical growth 
of the idea of God — i. e. the gradual increase 
of the contents of that idea to human thought — 
be objected to by any, it can only be by such as 
imagine that primeval man, prior to his lapse into 
sin, was in possession of the most perfect intel- 
lectual knowledge of God attainable by the hu- 
man mind, and that, notwithstanding the fall, this 
knowledge survived, and was transmitted by the 
first man adown the line of his descendants, albeit 
with ever-diminishing purity and clearness. But 
of this there is no evidence whatever. Even the 
first chapters of Genesis, supposing them to offer 
literally true history, do not furnish a particle of it. 
They do exhibit man as the son of God, made 
in his image, and therefore full of intellectual pos- 
sibilities, and in original moral harmony with his 
Maker, but yet as an undeveloped being, who 



28 THE BEING OF GOD 

could not hand down to his posterity that which he 
himself did not possess. As he had neither art 
nor science, but was soon surpassed in these re- 
spects by his offspring, so he had no such intellec- 
tual conceptions of God as to place him far above 
their level. He knew God as good to him, as far 
more powerful than himself, and as his Master. 
Until his mind was unfolded and trained in the 
school of experience, he could know no more. But 
not to insist on this, assume that he knew all that 
imagination can ascribe to him ; you do not thereby 
set aside the historical growth of the idea of God. 
For history has nothing to do with the Garden of 
Eden. It deals always with sinful, and through 
long ages with ignorant, savage men, by whom 
scarce a hint of primitive knowledge, if it came to 
them, appears to have been apprehended or re- 
tained. And it finds that their idea of God grew 
in the same way that their ideas about the physical 
world grew. True, it nowhere witnesses the birth 
of the idea ; but it meets it innumerable times in 
the state of weakest, scarcely breathing existence. 
It does not, as was once supposed, find that the first 
stage in religious belief is that of f etichism. That 
error has been effectually set aside.^ But man's 
earliest conceptions of God were undoubtedly an- 
thropomorphic and anthropopathic in the extreme. 

^ Cf. Max Miiller, Origin o/Eeligion, Lect. 2. 



THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 29 

TVliat are the gods of oldest Egypt, Chaldea, 
Greece, but magnified liuman beings? Is not the 
distance betweeen those conceptions of God or 
gods, and that presented by the Christian church 
of the one Infinite and Eternal Spirit, almost too 
vast to be apprehended? Surely, the transition 
from the one to the other of conceptions so far 
apart cannot have been otherwise than gradual. 
The sacred Scriptures themselves fully warrant this 
assertion. From the early Hebrew conception of a 
God whose footsteps are heard in the garden, and 
who walks and talks with man in face-to-face com- 
munion, to the prophetic idea of the unapproach- 
able transcendence of Jehovah is a great advance ; 
and greater still, from an intellectual point of view, 
is that from the conception of God as distinct! onless 
personal unity, to the Christian doctrine of the 
Trinity. But it is not to be supposed that the ages 
that intervened between these flood -points were 
periods of mental stagnation. They were spring- 
times of deeper and broader views, — intervals dur- 
ing which, under the brooding of the Divine Spirit, 
the chaos-like confusion of thought assumed ever 
greater order and harmony. 

Now that which first brought the existence of 
God home to men as an element of conscious 
thought may be assumed to have been some form 
of the cosmological argument, so called because it 



80 THE BEING OF GOD 

is suggested to the mind upon the contemplation 
of the K6crfxo<;, the physical world. With this, there- 
fore, we fitly begin. It has been presented in 
numerous modifications. Aristotle, more than 
three hundred years before Christ, argued from 
the presence of perpetual motion, i. e. change and 
transition, in the world to the existence of a being 
from whom all motion proceeds, a prime mover, 
whom he identified with God. Modern philosophy 
presents what is substantially the same argument, 
in this form : everything in the world is perishable 
and transitory, contingent, — L e. dependent for 
existence on something else. Hence there must 
be something which is not contingent, but neces- 
sarily Qi. e. self-) existent. The cogency of the 
reasoning in either form is derived from our con- 
ception of causation. Every movement or change, 
we say, has a cause ; and experience teaches us 
that in the physical world every effect-producing 
cause is itself an effect of a remoter cause, and 
that of one still more remote, and so on as far as 
we can trace the line. But the mind, by constitu- 
tional necessity, refuses to conceive this line or 
chain of causation as running forever backward 
into the past without commencement or starting- 
point. For, since every particular change or effect 
— that is, every link in the chain — has a begin- 
ning, the chain as such must have had a beginning. 



THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 31 

To say that it had not would be to say that some- 
where there was a cause that had a beginning 
and yet did not begin, which would be absurd. 
Hence the mind is driven to the conclusion that, 
back of the whole chain of causation, there ex- 
isted and operated a cause which, unlike all causes 
of which we have experience, was not itself the 
effect of an antecedent cause, but — for this is the 
only possible alternative — has tbe source of its 
own existence in itself. 

Nor is this all. That which urges to this conclu- 
sion necessitates another step. The self-existent 
cause or causes cannot be conceived as impersonal. 
It cannot be mere physical energy. The very idea 
of a physical cause implies that it is itself an effect, 
a something through which energy is transmitted, 
but by which it cannot be originated. It is just 
for that reason that every cause in the cosmic sys- 
tem drives us back to another more ulterior cause. 
Moreover, as a stream cannot rise higher than its 
source, so a cause must be adequate to its effect. 
Therefore, since in the world we find not merely 
organic objects, but personal beings, men, person- 
ality must be found in the First Cause. 

This conclusion is as old as human intelligence. 
Its root exists in the mind in the form of a first 
principle of thought or inborn conviction, prior to 
all philosophical analysis. The mind is so made 



32 THE BEING OF GOD 

tliat it demands a cause for every effect, and re- 
gards an effect without a cause as impossible. It 
was tliis innate conviction tliat gave to men their 
first intellectual assurance of tlie existence of some- 
thing higher, more powerful, than themselves. 
They saw the rain and lightning, heard the thun- 
der, felt the wind, and instinctively said — not, as 
we say, it rains, it lightens, but — He rains. He 
lightens. He gives forth his voice. They knew 
that these phenomena had a cause beyond the com- 
pass of their own force, and thence inferred the 
existence of power or powers above themselves. 
The nature and steps of the reasoning were by no 
means as clear to them as they are to us. They 
did not even ask themselves why it was impossible 
to suppose that thunder, rain, and lightning had 
no cause, but just happened ; still less did they 
inquire by what right they inferred the personality 
of the source of energy. Their intellects — unintim- 
idated by the analytic habit, which, while it tends 
to accuracy of reasoning, too often seems to liquefy 
the mind, and incapacitate it for retaining the im- 
press of any conviction except that knowledge is 
difficult — worked automatically, without much aid 
from reflection, under the powerful influence of the 
inborn idea of causation. It did not at all occur 
to them at first to take account of the fact that be- 
tween the rain and the rain-maker, whose existence 



THE UNITY OF THE FIRST CAUSE 33 

they confidently inferred, there might be many 
other causes, such as clouds to carry the water, 
and winds to waft them on. Even the personality 
of the rain-maker was but an unconscious inference 
from the general principle of causation. Under 
the influence of this apriori conception, imbedded 
in the constitution of their minds, they passed at 
once from the rain to a personal rain-maker. Ob- 
serve, I do not say that man's conscious albeit ellip- 
tical and unanalytical reasoning first suggested the 
thought of a higher being. That thought he had 
before, perhaps long before, in the shadowy form 
of what the Germans call Ahmmg, — foreboding ; 
but it now found a place in his reason, became an 
accepted truth, of which he could give some ac- 
count, and which henceforth exerted a strong deter- 
minino: influence over his thouo^ht and conduct. 
The existence of higher powers explained not only 
the rain, lightning, thunder, wind, or whatever else 
first led his mind up to them, but also the flowing 
river, the drifting cloud, the changing seasons, the 
appearance and disappearance of organized life in 
all its forms. 

But to return to the argument. It is evident 
that neither in the form in which primitive men 
employed it, nor in that which maturer thought 
has given to it, does it of necessity lead to 07ie 
First Cause. That it did not do so in early ages 



34 THE BEING OF GOD 

is shown by the prevalence of polytiieism. Eacli 
god is, in his own special sphere, a first cause. 
That it does not in the modern form may be seen 
when we give it the most general expression of 
which it admits, as thus : If anything exists, then 
something self -existent exists ; but something does 
exist, e, g. myself: therefore something self -exist- 
ent exists. The argument is good as far as it goes ; 
but it does not go so far as to show that the self- 
existent something is numerically one and unique. 
In order to justify that conclusion, the major pre- 
mise should be : If anything exists, then there 
must be one, sole, unique, self-existent something. 
Can we justify the general proposition in that 
form ? Not absolutely, but with high probabil- 
ity. We can, at all events, come much nearer it 
than men did in polytheistic days. Our larger ac- 
quaintance with the processes of the physical world 
tends strongly to lead us to one sole author of all 
that is. No doubt even the most primitive man 
had some conception of what we call intermediate 
causes. The veriest savage, when the wind over- 
turns his hut, knows that the wind is not the first 
cpvuse of the catastrophe. He goes back to the 
maker, ruler, or soul of the wind. But where he 
can trace two or three links in the chain of cause 
and effect, we can follow it up through an almost 
endless succession of actions and reactions. Where 



THE UNITY OF THE FIRST CAUSE 35 

his attention is arrested by but a few of tbe more 
striking phenomena, science has taught us to rec- 
ognize causality everywhere. True, the inference 
from a long chain is not more cogent than that 
from a short one ; nor that from many chains 
necessarily more conclusive than from a few. But 
the long chains and the many have brought us to 
perceive the unity that pervades the world. We 
see that innumerable lines of causation work in 
perfect harmony ; that movements in the most 
widely separated parts, and of the most opposite, 
yea, mutually destructive character, are so bal- 
anced that nevertheless the world is what the 
Greek philosophers already called it, a Cosmos, 
a well-ordered whole. We see even more. We 
see that every cause and effect is so interlinked 
with others as to suggest that, when we talk of 
chains of causation as if they were lying alongside 
of each other without manifold mutual connections, 
we are wide of the truth. A much better symbol 
is furnished by the genealogical tree of some an- 
cient family, with its countless lines of descent, 
direct and collateral, and its equally numerous in- 
termixtures by marriage with other families. In 
truth, all the great doctrines and theories of recent 
physical science, such as the conservation and cor- 
relation of force, tend directly toward the conclu- 
sion that energy circulates in the universe as the 



36 THE BEING OF GOD 

blood in the living organism ; and that, as the lat- 
ter has its propelling centre in the heart, so the 
former must have some one analogous central 
cause. It is doubtless because some glimmerings 
of this truth have always been perceived by men 
that germs of monotheistic thought so frequently 
appear in the midst of the densest polytheism. 
Just so far as we find causation leading us back to 
one centre, so far are we constrained to assume 
one sole cause of the physical universe. Nor, 
though this argument trenches closely on the bor- 
ders of the teleologij3al, is it justly chargeable with 
being a mere anticipation thereof. It is wholly 
independent of the idea of design. It plants itself, 
on the one hand, on the indestructibleness and 
therefore unity of force, however numerous its 
metamorphoses ; and on the other, on the perma- 
nence of the world, notwithstanding the apparent 
variety of incompatible energies. But it fails of 
absolute conclusiveness because neither of its alter- 
native bases rests on anything more than a very 
incomplete induction. 

Here let us pause to consider one or two objec- 
tions. The cosmological argument is worthless if 
the conception of causation on which it depends be 
vulnerable. Now, Hume maintained that it is. 
The relation between cause and effect, he contended, 
may, for aught we know, be nothing more than 



HUME ON THE IDEA OF CAUSE §7 

invariable sequence, — invariable so far as our 
experience goes ; and beyond experience we liave 
no knowledge. As often as we see event A, we 
find it followed by event B: and this frequently 
recurring sequence begets in us the confident belief 
that B is dependent on A, and that A determines 
B. There may be more than sequence ; but we can 
never know, and therefore have no right to assume, 
that there is. All our knowledge springs from ex- 
perience ; and experience does not tell us anything 
about the relation between what we term cause and 
effect, except that the one goes before and the other 
follows after. Of course, if this be all we know 
of causation, the cosmological argument falls to the 
ground. But is it all we know ? Night invariably 
follows day, and winter summer ; but does any one 
ever think of them as causes and effects ? Year in, 
year out, the factory bell rings at noon, and before 
it has ceased to vibrate a stream of operatives 
issues from the building. Year in, year out, the 
engine in the same factory starts up at say six 
o'clock in the morning, and at once a hundred 
machines throughout the building begin to spin 
or knit or weave. Here are two sets of sequences ; 
but of one you say, it is mere sequence, — of the 
other, it is cause and effect. Why this difference, 
if you know nothing but sequence ? Experience, 
observation ? But experience, as Hume truly says, 



38 THE BEING OF GOD 

tells us nothing about tlie nature of that which 
connects cause and effect. On the other hand, 
while experience is needed to assure us that night 
will follow day, and that the operatives will take 
their nooning as soon as the bell rings, it is not 
needed to teach us that, if machines spin or weave 
or make watches, there is a cause, a whole series 
of causes, for it. Even a child, whose prior expe- 
rience is null, if it burn a finger in the flame of a 
candle, does not need to burn itself a second time 
to know that the pain is an effect and the flame a 
cause. It has an innate sense of efficiency long 
before it understands the meaning of the words 
" cause and effect." Between cause and effect the 
mind apprehends a necessary connection, so that 
if one be present the absence of the other is felt to 
be impossible, unthinkable. Not so with mere 
sequence. I can think of summer and winter as 
existing apart, as they actually do under the equa- 
tor and at the poles ; but I cannot think that a 
new life springs into being, or that a boulder 
changes its place, without a cause. 

Another objection is that of Kant, who asserts 
that the " principle of causality is valid only within 
the field of experiences, but inapplicable, yea 
meaningless, beyond it." But since the principle 
of causality is in no way indebted for its authority 
to experience, it is difficult to see why its validity 



KANT ON CAUSALITY 39 

should be limited to the field of experience. Cer- 
tainly, the mind is aware of no such limitation, but 
as the author of the " Critical Philosophy " himself 
says, urgently demands to find repose in a first 
cause. The principle is a law of mind, with the 
origin of which neither human thought nor human 
experience had anything to do. Experience merely 
furnishes the occasions on which it asserts itself ; 
and it does that as strongly when, in the regress of 
thought, it reaches the first link in the chain of 
causation, as when it contemplates the latest 
change that falls under its notice. True, no 
sense-perception can trace the first physical effect 
that ever took place in the world to its supersen- 
suous cause. The physical trail breaks off where 
the first physical effect begins ; but the innate 
conception of causality is as clear and imperious 
at that point as at any other. And though it may 
be urged that the concept of causality is called into 
play only by phenomena, concerning the realities 
back of which we know nothing, yet that which it 
demands, efficiency, is confessedly not phenomenal, 
but an attribute of the otherwise perhaps unknown 
reality. It would seem, therefore, that to refuse 
credence to that necessity of mind which the prin- 
ciple expresses when it leads across the boundary 
of experience, is to discredit it in all its utterances, 
and in fact to make knowledge of any kind impos- 
sible. 



40 THE BEING OF GOD 

But the objection may be urged in another way.^ 
It ma}^ be said that that which connects cause and 
effect in the physical world is the transition of 
physical force ; and that from the prime physical 
impulse we cannot pass to a spiritual power with- 
out leaping a chasm. But we do make this leap — 
if leap it be — every time we reason from some 
physical effect, say a painting or a statue, to an an- 
tecedent act of spiritual power in man. The objec- 
tion assumes that the demand for a cause, which 
the mind necessarily makes in the presence of an 
effect, is a demand for a cause of the same nature 
with the object in which the effect is wrought. But 
this is not the case. When we see an effect, a 
movement or change of any kind, we linow there is 
a cause for it, although we may not know what the 
cause is, or where it is. Concerning its nature, we 
do not necessarily make any affirmation whatever. 
When in the morning I find that my boat, which 
last night I saw riding safely at its mooring in the 
stream, has disappeared, I know that some cause 
has removed or set it adrift ; but until I investi- 
gate I do not know whether that cause was physical 
or spiritual, — ' w^hether it was a violent squall that 
passed while I slept, an unusually high and heavy 
tide, a piece of entangled driftwood that chafed 
and parted the mooring-rope, or a knife in a human 
1 Cf . MuKord, BepuUic of God, p. 7 f . 



RECAPITULATION 41 

hand, directed and impelled by a human will, i, e. 
by a spiritual power. The only thing of which I 
am absolutely certain is that some cause, equal to 
the effect, has removed the boat from its place. So, 
when I see the change from summer to winter, or 
the converse, I know that there is a cause for it ; 
but I do not know that the cause is physical, until 
I am told of the inclination of the equator to 
the ecliptic, and its consequences. Until thus in- 
structed, I might imagine that it was effected by 
the energy of gnomes or earth-spirits. The innate 
idea of causality, as such, makes no distinction be- 
tween physical and spiritual energy. Nor, indeed, 
can we. When we speak of physical and spiritual 
causes, we classify, not the force or energy, but the 
substance or being in which it inheres. Of energy 
we have no conception at all, except as the source 
of motion ; and that we have only because we are 
conscious of exerting energy ourselves. 

Let us now cast a reviewing glance over the ar- 
gument, and see what we have gained. We have 
found that the presence of motion, change, life, and 
decay in the world involve the existence of a self- 
existent first cause or causes. This conclusion has 
the highest possible certitude for us, because it is 
the unequivocal deliverance of a principle inherent 
in our mental constitution. It is true that a self- 
existent first cause is as inconceivable to us as a 



42 TRE BEING OF GOD 

self -existent universe ; ^ but it is not the inconceiv- 
able, in tlie proper sense of the word, of which the 
idea of causality takes cognizance. It applies only 
to whatever had a beginning, and is satisfied when 
it reaches that which had no beginning. As for 
the difficulty of the idea of the creation of matter, 
the raw material of the universe, the non-eternity 
of which is not apparent, it does not concern us 
here. We make no claim that the cosmological 
argument infers more than a self -existent fashioner 
of the cosmos. 

We have found, secondly, that the self -existent 
cause or causes must be conceived of as personal. 
This, if not directly expressed by the idea of cau- 
sality, is legitimately deducible from it, and appears 
no less certain than the preceding conclusion. 

And, thirdly, we have found good reason to con- 
clude that there are not first causes, but one only 
First Cause. The ground for this is furnished by 
the unity of the cosmos, notwithstandijig its many 
contrarieties. It is therefore established just so 
far as that unity can be proved, and no farther. 
The originally strong presumption for it has hith- 
erto increased as physical science has advanced, and 
may be expected to do so in the future. The con- 
clusion founded upon it may therefore be described 
as highly probable, but not, as yet, demonstrative. 

1 Cf. Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, p. 149. 



PANTHEISTIC OBJECTION 43 

We find, then, as the result of the cosmological ar- 
gument, taken by itself, that there is a self -existent 
personal First Cause of the physical universe, and 
with only less certainty that there is but one. 

But does the argument also justify the conclu- 
sion that the one, personal First Cause exists in- 
dependently of the universe, — that he is, in that 
sense, an extra-mundane being ? Pantheism says, 
No ! It admits an eternal first cause, but finds it 
in the world itself, taken as substance. The phe- 
nomenal world, it says, is indeed contingent, depen- 
dent, perishable, — always beginning and always 
ending ; but the real world, back of the phenome- 
nal, is eternal and self -existent. It is an ocean of 
being, out of which, by the necessity of its immuta- 
ble nature, all forms of life emerge, and into which 
they return. To this I reply that, if the world be 
such as pantheism regards it, it must be a personal 
being. The personality of the First Cause has, I 
think, been already shown to follow from our con- 
ception of causality ; but a word or two more may 
here be added. The mind rests satisfied in no 
impersonal, unconscious cause. Such a cause we 
call intermediate, meaning thereby that it is but 
a storage-point of energy, received, held, and ex- 
pended under fixed conditions. The whole com- 
plex of causal sequences in the unconscious world 
seenas to be but a gigantic system of powerful ma- 



44 THE BEING OF GOD 

chinery, of whicli every wheel and cog, every shaft 
and belt, confesses — the source of power is not in 
me. In other words, the mind finds no explana- 
tion of the origin of power or energy until it comes 
to something like itself, — i. e. personal being. 
Therefore, the world, if it be the sum and source 
of being, should be personal. But is it ? Does the 
universe, so far as we know it, produce the impres- 
sion of self-conscious personality ? Does it not at 
every point produce the opposite impression ? Not- 
withstanding all its beauty, order, stability, and 
sublimity, does it not, apart from the thought of 
God, impress us as cold and heartless ; unfree, nay, 
fettered, and blindly moving in endless cycles, 
without aim or purpose ? Do we not know that, 
just so far as we ourselves are included in the cos- 
mic mechanism, we are repressed, bound, and en- 
slaved, with scarce a joy in life save that which 
springs from the possession of personality, which, 
while it lasts, lifts us a little above the physical 
process, and gives us a taste of freedom and inde- 
pendence of material conditions ? The answer, I 
know, does not demonstrate the impossibility of the 
pantheistic assumption ; but until that assumption 
is backed by stronger evidence than has ever yet 
been brought for it, it may be considered to turn 
the scales. And so we may add that the eternal 
First Cause of the universe is not a part of the uni- 



THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 45 

verse itself, not a world-soul, but a super-cosmic 
being. Have we, then, proved the existence, not of 
a god, but of God ? the Christian God ? By no 
means. The argument from causality can never 
prove a cause whose measure exceeds the measure 
of the effect. Whether the Maker of the physical 
universe be or be not equal to other effects, infi- 
nitely higher and grander, is a question as to which 
the cosmological argument is utterly dumb. And 
it is only by a glaring noii sequitur^ by which the 
argument itself has been unjustly discredited, that 
theologians have so generally drawn from it the full 
conclusion that God, our God, is. The fact, sin- 
gular as it seems, is easily explained. The mind, 
said Tertullian, is naturally Christian. So we may 
say, the mind naturally inclines to believe in 
God, infinite in being and perfections, and, in its 
eagerness to find and point him out, forgets to 
watch and weigh, at every step, the processes of 
its reasoning. 

We turn next to the teleological, or, as it is also 
termed, the physico-theological argument. Here 
the reasoning is from the presence of design in the 
world to a designer. In the constitution of the 
world, — thus runs this argument, — there is every- 
where adaptation of means to ends ; therefore the 
universe was constructed by an intelligent designer. 



46 THE BEING OF GOD 

Peculiarly adapted to tlie Greek mind, because 
related to the perception of measure, proportion, 
and beauty in physical forms, for which the 
Greeks had keen eyes, it was already used by Soc- 
rates, in the fifth century B. c. And the concep- 
tion of God to which it leads, as working according 
to weight and measure, is, as Dorner points out,^ 
found a century earlier in the second Isaiah, and 
before him in the book of Job. It cannot, how- 
ever, have suggested itself to the untutored mind 
nearly so early as the argument from causality. 
It presupposes higher development of thought 
and more extended habits of reflection. The child 
of to-day apprehends the working of causality in 
nature long before it perceives that of design. 
The same must have been true of primitive man. 
The inseparable connection of causal force with 
every instance of design or purpose carried into 
effect — the necessary condition under which alone 
we can recognize previously existing design — is 
apt to put a stop to all further investigation by 
the ordinary mind. Even the cultivated mind is 
not so immediately impressed by design as by cau- 
sality. A person sees for the first time a piece of 
mechanism — say a stocking-knitter. He thinks at 
once. Somebody made it, and asks. Who ? That 
question answered, he probably feels satisfied. He 

^ Glaubenslehre, i. p. 259. 



THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 47 

thinks it will save work and make stockings 
cheaper, and goes his way. Of the intelligence 
involved in the machine, of the curious adaptation 
of part to part for the automatic production of a 
thing of such peculiar shape, he takes but small if 
any note, unless he be, as we say, of a mechanical 
turn of mind. It is in that way that nine persons 
out of ten gaze on the constructions of an exhibi- 
tion of machinery. And though the tenth may be 
instantly impressed by the marks of intelligence, 
he can form no adequate conception of the amount 
and quality of that intelligence, until after minute 
examination of the machine and careful reflection. 
If such be the case when the mechanism is so com- 
pact as to be visible in all its parts at once, how 
much less probably will the observation of intelli- 
gence occupy the foreground when the parts are 
scattered over miles of distance, and can only with 
difficulty be combined in one mental image. Who 
of you when he first beheld an electric light, an 
effect the producing cause of which was far away, 
thought of the intelligence behind it ? You 
thought of its intensity, its disagreeable color, the 
density of the shadow it cast, — of everything but 
the inferences it warranted as to its maker's char- 
acteristics. It was under similar circumstances 
that primitive men looked upon the universe, except 
— and that made the result in their case the more 



48 TRE BEING OF GOD 

inevitable — that they did not behold it first in 
mature years, so as to be roused by the shock of 
novelty and surprise. Ages must have elapsed 
before accidental discoveries and occasional flashes 
of insight connected some distant or for other 
reasons previously unobserved causes with present 
useful effects, to such an extent, and in such a way, 
as to suggest to them that their god or gods made 
use of contrivances, employed means for precon- 
ceived ends, as they themselves built huts for shel- 
ter, constructed traps to catch game, and fashioned 
weapons for war and tools for work. Probably 
the greatest obstacle to this advance in knowledge 
was the habit of early men of endowing almost 
every natural object with life and powers like their 
own. That habit had to be given up, as to any 
given object, before it could occur to any one to 
regard the object as the means or instrument by 
which a higher being produced some useful end. 
That done, it is not difficult to conceive what would 
follow. The dark rain-cloud, e. g., rising on the 
horizon, no larger than a man's hand, advancing 
swiftly, and expanding until it covered the whole 
sky, and distilled its waters over all the region, 
refreshing grass and grain, man and his herds, — 
seen, perhaps, for the hundredth time by the same 
eyes, — at last awakened in some thoughtful mind 
the notion of design : What an admirable coutri- 



THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 49 

vance for bringing water from afar ! Once started 
on this track, other contrivances were speedily dis- 
covered. The river near by had been traced for 
long distances far into the mountains, through 
deep, rocky defiles, to brook-fed pools and lakes 
which furnished its unfailing streams. Here also 
contrivance was now seen. Thus men went on, 
discovering ever new instances of adaptation of 
means to ends, some beneficial, others hurtful, or 
one or other by turns ; and the inference was 
forced upon them that the higher powers, whether 
propitious or angry, were all and always intelli- 
gent and wise. 

It would be impracticable, as well as superfluous, 
to attempt even an outline of the evidence of de- 
sign in nature, as it lies before the human mind 
to-day. Whole volumes have been filled with 
proofs afforded by different minute portions of the 
universal system. There is not a spot in heaven 
or on earth, to which telescope or microscope can 
reach, that does not reveal what, in its ordinary 
mood, the mind unhesitatingly recognizes as de- 
sign. Nor is there a living organism, whether 
vegetable or animal, — in the air, on the land, in 
the water, — that does not exhibit, as a whole and 
in all its component parts, the marks of careful 
adaptation. More than this : As in the individual 
organism the several parts are not ends in them- 



50 THE BEING OF GOD 

selves, but rather means in relation to the whole, so 
the individual is again a means to the species from 
which it springs, the species to the genus, the genus 
to the order, and the order to every other order ; 
so that the world of organic objects presents a net- 
work of adaptations, running in every direction, 
crossing and recrossing, acting and reacting. And 
yet, while everything is thus acting on everything 
else, closely or remotely, there is a rising scale of 
^istence, a steady progression from lower to higher 
organisms, the less perfect of which exist as means 
to the more perfect, until it culminates in man, for 
whose production, sustenance, and advancement 
all else exists. 

This is enough to indicate the nature and range 
of the argument. Let us listen to the objections 
made against it. They are at bottom but two. The 
first, while admitting the prevalence of adaptation 
(i. e., adaptedness), denies that it proves design; 
the second contends that if there be design, it is so 
far from universal, and in so many instances fails 
of beneficent result, as to vitiate the theological 
conclusion drawn from it. 

The mere denial of telic causes or final ends in 
nature can of course be taken only for what it is 
worth. Spinoza declared them to be nothing but 
figments of the imagination. All pantheists, as 
such, are obliged to take similar ground ; for tele- 



THE REALITY OF DESIGN 51 

ology is wholly inconsistent with their tenet of the 
identity of God and nature. The World-Spirit, 
not being self-conscious, still less self-determining, 
cannot be conceived to form purposes and pursue 
them. The admission of design is in fact so fatal 
to the doctrine of pantheists that their denial of it 
is not a serious difficulty in the way of theism. 
The case might stand differently, perhaps, if pan- 
theism rested on more solid grounds, and gave 
more satisfactory explanations of existence, than it 
does. However that may be, no mere denial is of 
value. Nor is it to the purpose to dress the denial 
in much-promising but really empty phraseology. 
We see, or think we see, abundant evidence in the 
physical universe of careful adjustment of means to 
ends. Thoughtful and observant men of all lands 
and ages have thought the same. If this belief be 
a mistake, the cause of that mistake, and its expla- 
nation, ought to be pointed out. We have, more- 
over, a right to demand that some other and better 
way of accounting for the facts of the universe 
shall be suggested. 

Pantheism, as such, does not do this ; but indi- 
viduals, whether pantheists, agnostics, or theists, 
make at least attempts to do it. Two of these are 
worthy of attention : the first would clear the 
world of final causes by pronouncing adaptations, 
the presence of which no one can deny, to be noth- 



62 THE BEING OF GOD 

ing else than conditions of existence. An organ- 
ism, a tree, or an animal, being what it is, can exist 
only nnder certain conditions, say of soil, light, air, 
temperature, food, and drink. Of course, therefore, 
if a tree or an animal exist, these conditions are 
found ; but beyond that you know nothing. Some 
years ago I read an article, in a British review, 
which presented this objection in an interesting 
form. The writer thought to demolish teleology by 
imagining the maggot in a cheese to say to itself, 
" What a good world this, in which I find myself ! 
How well adapted to my needs, and how evidently 
made for me ! " And yet, said the author, what 
the maggot finds is nothing but the conditions that 
make his existence possible ! 

The illustration is well adapted to mislead. For 
unless the reader be on the alert, he is likely to 
think of the dairyman, who certainly had no inten- 
tions favorable to the maggot, as the maker of the 
cheese, and then the maggot's reasoning is suffi- 
ciently absurd. But the real maker of the cheese 
is the author of those chemical properties of milk 
and rennet, by the combination of which curds are 
formed, and of whose action the dairyman merely 
availed himself. Bearing that in mind, the mag- 
got's philosophy is more rational than that of his 
critic. At any rate, the critic, without intending 
it, confesses that he can suggest no better. No 



DESIGN NOT TO BE DEFINED AWAY 53 

doubt, adaptation is a condition of existence ; but 
while the maggot goes on to ask after the origin of 
this adaptation, the critic seems to think the whole 
problem solved by the magic of a phrase, — condi- 
tion of existence. But existence and its conditions 
are the very things to be accounted for. Whence 
the conditions? Whence the organic being that 
lives under them ? If there be no designer, who 
made both and adjusted them to each other, there 
are, so far as I can see, but three conceivable 
modes of bringing maggot and cheese together. 
We may suppose, in the first place, — leaving the 
cheese still unaccounted for, — that the maggot, 
under the favoring influence of some accidental 
quality in the cheese, not designed for any such 
purpose, springs into being spontaneously. But 
although we once heard much about spontaneous 
generation, it is, I believe, to-day one of the dead 
and forgotten children of " the scientific imagina- 
tion," buried without even a headstone to mark its 
place of repose. Or we may suppose, secondly, 
that both the cheese and its inhabitant are the 
chance result of an original blind concourse of 
atoms ; or, lastly, that both separately and in their 
mutual relations, they are a passing phase assumed 
by a portion of the one universal substance — call 
it matter or God — whose life is one eternal 
process of evolution and involution according to 



64 THE BEING OF GOD 

its own inlierent and necessary laws. The chance- 
solution might not seem irrational in this instance 
of the maggot and the cheese. The creature, what- 
ever its use may be, is an object of disgust, which 
one would willingly give up to chance. But what 
if the chance-theory be extended to the universe as 
a whole? Pantheism, with its unconscious sub- 
stance, flashing out on every side into conscious, 
thinking existences, is rationality itself compared 
with this absurdity. 

The objection is not essentially altered when we 
are told that in finding design back of the adapta- 
tions in nature, we merely import our own subjec- 
tivity into nature, — in other words, that we infer 
design in nature simply because we are conscious 
of it in ourselves when we build a house, construct 
an engine, or use any contrivance whatever for a 
given end. It is doubtless true that any view of 
the universe is radically defective which regards 
it as a mere machine, contrived by a Power wholly 
outside of it, for the attainment of preconceived 
ends. There is indeed a sense in which it must 
be said that " the universe is not a machine, but 
an organism, with an indwelling principle of life," 
and " that it was not made, but has grown." ^ But 
it does not follow from that that the mind can rest 
in the assumption that it had no Maker. Dr. 

1 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 131, 



FINAL OR MECHANICAL CAUSES 55 

Hedge ^ thinks that " if we came to the contem- 
plation of nature without the idea of God in our 
minds, we should not view it as cunning mechanism, 
or at all as something created by antecedent power, 
but rather as a self-subsisting whole. The ques- 
tion of its origin would hardly force itself upon us ; 
we should accept it as it is, and suppose it to have 
been always as it is, and self-perpetuating. But 
if the cosmological argument has any bases in 
truth, this is precisely what we should not and 
could not do. And if that be not enough, the con- 
scious possession by us as personal beings of a de- 
gree of independence of all things else makes it 
forever impossible to regard the universe as a s^f- 
existent and self-perpe-tuating living entity of which 
we ourselves are but organic parts. 

The other method of banishing final causes is 
to make them incompatible with efficient, produc- 
ing causes. The force that works in the physical 
world, it is said, is mechanical, unintelligent, and 
therefore excludes design. It works with absolute, 
undeviating regularity, goes out of i^s way for 
neither king nor beggar, is as blind and deaf to 
the tears and groans of a smitten nation as to the 
life of an insect ; what room is there there for the 
operation of final causes? I can hardly under- 
stand the logic of this objection, unless it tacitly 
1 Ways of the Sjpirit, p. 158. 



66 THE BEING OF GOD 

assumes that there is or can be nothing over or 
back of the mechanical force, or else that teleology 
necessarily involves interference with the stable 
order of nature. The objection suggests more 
than one question which it would be interesting to 
pursue. What is the nature of the force that 
works in the physical universe ? Does it belong to 
matter as matter ? Assume that it does, then how 
did matter get this force ? If matter was created, 
then of course the creator imparted it. But we 
have no right to assume the creation of matter. 
If, on the other hand, we suppose it to be un- 
created, two possibilities still exist : either matter 
had this force eternally, in its own right and by 
its own nature, or it did not have it in its original 
condition, but received it as a donum su]peraddi- 
tum from the world-builder. In the former case, 
— to say. nothing now of the fact that this would 
involve a beginningiess, constantly proceeding evo- 
lution of finite things, — what reason is there to 
assume that a sufficient, intelligent Power could 
not direct the energies of matter towards the at- 
tainment of his own purposes, a thing which man 
does every time he constructs a mill-wheel or a 
steam-engine ? In the latter, what shall hinder us 
from believing that a Power great enough to give 
to matter the force now inherent in it did not 
merely direct it to his own purposes, but actually 



FORCE AND PUBPOSE 57 

made the automatic working out of all his plans 
the inevitable goal of the force he bestowed? so 
that, if we chose, we might conceive him as resting 
in perfect oblivion of his great machine, and yet 
believe most firmly in final causes ? 

The truth is, that when the existence of a First 
Cause (or Causes) has once been recognized by 
thought as absolutely necessary, the presence of 
purpose throughout the physical universe, and es- 
pecially throughout the boundless ranges of organic 
beings, is so overwhelmingly evident that few phi- 
losophers of note have ever thought of doubting it. 
Not only Kant and Schelling and Hegel, but 
Schopenhauer and Hartmann, admit it not merely, 
but vie with each other in pointing it out. Testi- 
mony such as this, inspired by no theological bias, 
for the most part, indeed, accompanied with express 
denial of the theological conclusion drawn from it, 
is surely as authoritative as that of human thought 
can be. The universe may be full of mechani- 
cal causes — although I confess that I can form no 
idea of their nature, unless they are manifestations 
of divine energy, and then " mechanical "" is not a 
good description of them ; but whatever their na- 
ture, they are working under a yoke imposed by 
intelligence for clearly defined purposes. And no 
scientific theories of how the several parts of the 
cosmos arose can obscure this fact. Assume that 



58 THE BEING OF GOD 

the stellar worlds were made out of star-dust or 
fire-mist, and that all forms of organic life that 
have ever existed sprang by slow evolution from 
one infinitesimal atom of protoplasm or from a 
single microscopic life-cell, then how grand beyond 
all power of human conception was the mind that 
put into the fire-mist and the cell — or, if you 
please, into the whole mass of matter that evolved 
the mist and cell — all that has come forth from 
them! 

The last objection to the teleological argument 
to be noticed is that it is incomplete, and there- 
fore inconclusive. It is indeed incomplete in the 
sense that it rests on an induction far from ex- 
haustive ; but is it therefore inconclusive ? How 
much of what is universally accepted as absolutely 
certain in physical science rests on even approxi- 
mately exhaustive induction? But there may be 
incompleteness of another kind. It is urged that 
in many instances the adaptation of means to ends 
in nature is imperfect, not being the best conceiva- 
ble ; that the result supposed to be aimed at is 
reached in comparatively few individuals of a class, 
say in a thousand fruit-blossoms out of a million, 
in one infant out of a hundred that are born ; that 
there are destructive as well as constructive exhibi- 
tions of energy, hideous deformity as well as beauty, 
cruelty as well as beneficence. AU this is stated 



SCOPE OF ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN 59 

by Dr. Mulford ^ with great force ; and all this has 
been felt for ages. It drove men to worship de- 
mons as well as gods, — to set Ahriman on a throne 
almost as high and eternal as that of Ahura-Mazda. 
But does it necessarily conflict with the assump- 
tion of an intelligent world-designer? If out of a 
million of apple-blossoms only a thousand grow into 
perfect fruit, may not the remaining thousands 
serve well-devised purposes, perchance even aiding, 
directly or indirectly, in the perfecting of their 
fellows ? Is there no reason to believe that what 
to us is hideous and discordant in nature raises the 
value and efBciency of the beautiful and harmoni- 
ous ? Are we so thoroughly acquainted with even 
that part of the organic world of which we know 
most, and with all its bearings on ultimate results, 
as to entitle us to pronounce anything absolutely 
useless, hideous, or cruel ? However that question 
may be answered, it cannot be denied that even 
what we call hideous and cruel is full of intelligent 
adaptation. There is in it not a trace of igno- 
rance or weakness. It was intended to be what it 
is, and fashioned for what it does. Its ultimate 
end only is hidden from us. 

The thing too often forgotten by both elabora- 
tors and critics of the teleological argument is its 
limited scope. It is not in itself capable of prov- 

1 Republic of God, p. 8 ff . 



60 THE BEING OF GOD 

ing the existence of a First Cause, — althougli it 
furnishes strong corroborative evidence for that 
position, — much less that of God, in the highest 
sense of that word, as the Holy and the Good. 
Dr. Mulford is right when he says that the " phys- 
ical process " is devoid of the moral element. 
Strong as it is, the expression, rigidly construed, 
is not too strong. The physical process is just as 
unmorsil (observe, not immoral) as the steam- 
engine or the electric current. Physical teleology 
alone certainly does not lead us to a moral author 
of the world, nor to one that is absolutely good and 
kind. And that because it leaves the ultimate end 
for which the world exists in obscurity. It shows 
us clearly that all organic life leads up to man, 
and exists for him ; but there it stops. It shows 
us man as the aim of creation, from the first reduc- 
tion of chaos until now, but does not tell us what is 
the end of his existence. He lives and dies like 
every other creature ; he lives in toil and sorrow 
beyond every other creature ; why was he made ? 
what was the Maker's final purpose, his last and 
highest aim, to which the whole creation tends ? 
To that question, the question of human existence, 
physical teleology gives no answer. The answer is 
found in man's moral nature ; but as a moral be- 
ing, man is outside of physical nature, — not wholly 
independent of it, but by his personality and free- 



SCOPE OF ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN 61 

dom superior to it. So far, then, as he is indepen- 
dent, free, and superior to the mechanism of nature, 
he is not comprehended within its physical teleol- 
ogy. In this sense, it is true that the physical 
process is devoid of the moral. There is in nature 
much that suggests the moral ; but before we can 
receive its suggestions, we must get our idea of the 
moral character of nature's Maker from another 
source. 

The true scope of teleology is that it exhibits 
the First Cause to be an intelligent and intellectu- 
ally powerful being. Moreover, it corroborates 
most strongly the reasoning against the pantheistic 
identification of God and the universe, in that it 
makes the self-consciousness of the First Cause 
absolutely certain ; for no unconscious being can 
make plans and adapt means to their attainment. 
But it does not go beyond the physical cosmos. 
It proves an intelligent world-maker or, more ac- 
curately, world-builder, — for as to the origin of 
matter teleology has nothing to say ; it shows him 
to be possessed of inconceivably great resources of 
intelligence, foresight, and adaptation. There its 
conclusion ends. We cannot logically extend it 
beyond the premises on which it rests, and say, as 
Dr. Hodge does, ^ " incomprehensibly great and 
infinitely great are practically equivalent," and 

^ Systematic Theology, i. 229. 



62 TEE BEING OF GOD 

then claim that the argament proves an infinite 
God. The greatness it proves is indeed overpower- 
ing to mortal thought ; and few, perhaps, except 
minds trained in this kind of reasoning, would hesi- 
tate to ace^t it as infinite, in spite of the logical 
deficiency ; nevertheless, the deficiency exists ; and 
its unconditional recognition will help us both to 
understand the difficulties of other minds, and to 
make our own position clearer and more rational, 
if not convincing, to them. 



LECTUEE III. 

THE MORAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS. 

We come now to tlie third proof of the existence 
of God, — that derived from the moral nature of 
man. Much less attention has been given in the 
schools to this argument than to those already con- 
sidered. It is looked for in vain in many treatises 
on theology, even after Kant had declared it to 
be the only^ but all-sufficient ground, for rational 
belief in God. Yet the moral force on which it 
builds, to wit, conscience, has undoubtedly in all 
ages, from the very earliest date of man's existence 
as a moral heing^ been the most efficient revealer 
of God and his existence. Wherever we get a 
glimpse of living men, we find them beings whose 
reasonings, as St. Paul expresses it, are much given 
to accusing and excusing each other and — what 
is even more to the point — themselves. We find 
in them all alike the sense of right and wrong ; con- 
sciousness of happiness in the doing of the one, 
and of poignant remorse and fearful apprehension 
attendant on the other. From this experience, 
what more natural than the inference that there 



64 THE BEING OF GOD 

is a power above man that loves and rewards tliat 
which is good, and hates and punishes that which 
is evil, — especially as men so often felt themselves 
at variance with the moral direction, and thus were 
forced to ascribe its voice to something outside of 
themselves. The facts came home to every man 
in his own daily experience. They needed no 
lengthened observation and reflection to bring them 
to light. They suggested their conclusion with a 
power and directness far exceeding that which 
attended the inferences from the changeableness 
of the world and the presence of design. They 
furnished, if not the earliest, certainly the most 
efficient, suggestion to men of an authority inde- 
pendent of and above men. If philosophers paid 
small regard to them, the reason may perhaps be 
found in the universality and simplicity of the 
facts, which seemed to leave nothing for the pro- 
foundly philosophical mind to exercise itself upon. 
Concerning the foundation fact of this argument 
there is and can be no dispute. There is in every 
human being something that passes judgment on 
his actions, and says. You ought, or You ought not, 
as occasion requires. We call it " conscience," or 
more exactly, the moral sense. Its deliverances, 
we all know from experience, are ordinarily 
prompt, clear, and persistent. Thus far all are 
agreed. But can we thence infer the existence of 



FBEEDOM ESSENTIAL TO MORALITY 6E> 

a moral being who is the author of this moral sense 
in us ? Here opinions diverge. It is pointed out 
that, in order to be a truly moral being, man must 
himself make, or at least freely adopt, the moral 
law under which he lives. If that law be imposed 
upon him as authoritative by another, it may give 
to his actions the outward show and semblance of 
morality, but not its reality. Nor is it necessary 
to this result that man should be deprived of the 
power to choose and do the immoral. That is to 
say, it is not at all necessary that he should be re- 
duced to a mere automaton, unconsciously working 
what has the appearance of being good. It is 
enough if the outside moral power wins him over 
by promises of good or threats of evil. The only 
reaUy moral being is one who pursues the right be- 
cause it is right and as such valuable, — who 
would pursue it even if it brought him misery in- 
stead of happiness. A bought or enforced morality 
is a spurious morality. If man's morality be true 
morality, it must originate within him, and conse- 
quently cannot testify to a moral lawgiver outside 
of him. The argument from conscience can be 
valid only at the expense of genuine morality itself. 
And if man's morality be spurious, what sort of in- 
ference can be drawn from it as to a higher moral 
being ? 

The objection thus stated must be allowed. But 



6Q THE BEIXG OF GOD 

it derives its force from the indefiniteness of the 
term " moral law." TThat do we mean by it, or 
rather what should we meau by it, when we speak 
of it as imposed upon man or implanted in him ? 
Nothing more, I apprehend, than the bare, unde- 
veloped, and at the outset inactive and latent fac- 
ult}^ of making moral distinctions, — of seeing dif- 
ferences between right and wrong. We certainly 
do not mean that every man is born with a know- 
ledge of the decalogue or any other compendium 
of moral law. History shows wide divergences 
among men as to what is or is not moral What 
is considered right in one age or country is wrong 
elsewhere or at another time. This holds not only 
when we compare savage tribes with Christian na- 
tions, but also when savage tribe is compared 
with savage tribe and Christian nation with Chris- 
tian nation. The frequency of persecution for 
conscience' sake, and the heroism with which it is 
endured, prove the strength of the convictions 
held by conscience, but also the variability of its 
utterances : for persecutors have consciences as 
well as persecuted. That which we bring with 
us when we enter the world is, in the first place, 
the latent notion of abstract right and wrong ; and 
in the second place, the undeveloped faculty of 
apj^lying this notion in judging of actions. It is 
at first neither in exercise, nor has it in itself any- 



THE ORIGIN OF MORAL LAW 67 

thing to exercise itself on. The moral sense is, in 
these respects, in the same condition as the truth 
sense, i. e., the reason and understanding. That, 
too, is at the outset an unawakened possibility, sub- 
sequently supplied with material on which to work 
by the external world. The same is true of all 
our physical senses. The eye and ear must have 
objects presented to them before thoj^can see or 
hear ; and, what is not less to be considered, they 
must also learn to see and hear aright, — i. e. they 
must learn so to see and hear as to judge accu- 
rately of the nature of the objects seen or heard. 
Now when the moral sense, in the course of the 
individual's development, is brought face to face 
with actions, how does it recognize them as right 
or wrong ? Not immediately by its own intuition, 
for then there could be no diversity of moral 
judgment, but by the aid of the under^anding. 
The understanding points out the consequences of 
actions, hurtful or helpful, to others ; arid in view 
of these consequences, the moral sense declares 
them right or wrong. The understanding says, 
If I take this man's bread, his wife and child r-en 
must suffer hunger ; whereupon conscience de- 
clares, It would be wrong — you must not do it. 
The understanding says. This man's house is on 
fire ; if I put it out, I shall save his goods and 
insure his comfort and happiness ; and conscience 



68 THE BEING OF GOD 

instantly concludes, That is right — do it. Back 
of the reasoning, in both instances, there lies the 
conviction, itself the outcome of previous social 
experiences, that I ought to treat my fellows as I 
would have them treat me. The social life, you 
see, from the first has acted on the understanding, 
and the understanding has so presented questions 
to the moral sense as to elicit its answers. All 
three acting together, — social life, the under- 
standing, and the moral sense, — acting together, 
yet each in its own sphere, formed in time catego- 
ries or catalogues of actions which were henceforth 
instantly felt to be right or wrong, needed not to 
be reasoned out again, but became the ready-made 
contents of the conscience of succeeding genera- 
tions. This conjoint growth of society, the intel- 
lectual powers and the moral sense, explains the 
partial diversity, but also the ever-growing sweep 
and unanimity, of men's moral judgments. As to 
the pleasure and pain that attend right and wrong 
doing, they are not more inconsistent with free 
self-determination than the physical comfort or 
distress incident to many actions. Gently inciting 
or deterring, they guard the moral nature against 
injury through heedlessness, without overbearing 
whatever considerations may suggest the opposite 
course. The greater positive awards of prosperity 
and happiness, or punishment and misery, either in 



MOBALITY NOT UTILITY 69 

this or a future life, are not parts of the natural 
moral law, but grow out of the reasonings of men on 
the attitude which God must hold towards right 
and wrong. They show that men, as soon as they 
believe in a God, believe him to be the conservator 
of moral order ; but they do not authenticate them- 
selves as immediate moral intuitions. Hence, of 
these hopes and fears men may rid themselves, 
and do rid themselves, when they cease to believe 
in a personal God and his providential government 
of the world ; but they do not thereby, and they 
never can, lose the sense of right and wrong, and 
the present peace or discomfort, that attends all 
moral actions. 

But it may seem that while we have thus made 
man develop for himself the contents of the moral 
law under which he lives, and have thereby shown 
him to be free from moral compulsion, we have re- 
duced the moral element to mere social expediency 
or utility. This, however, does not follow. When 
stealing was seen to be subversive of society, and 
the understanding brought it to the notice of the 
moral sense, the latter, in declaring it wrong, made 
an affirmation which the intellectual faculty cannot 
make. It introduced a wholly new and distinct 
element into the judgment. The understanding 
may say. This is true, useful, expedient, — these 
are the elements, the categories, as philosophers 



70 THE BEING OF GOD 

say, about which the understanding is conversant ; 
it cannot say, This is right, or, This is wrong; 
for the same reason that the eye cannot say, This 
is loud ; or the ear. This is red ; or the touch, This 
is sweet. The intellect, as such, knows nothing of 
right or wrong. The social emergency does not 
create the moral judgment. It merely furnishes 
the occasion for the moral sense to act, just as the 
perceptions of the physical senses give occasion for 
the intellect to work. 

That the moral sense cannot be the outcome of 
nature, i. e. of anything short of a power superior 
to nature and not part of it, is almost too evident 
to need elucidation. Whence could it come ? Is 
it imposed by the individual on himself ? But the 
individual is frequently in flagrant rebellion against 
it, and yet cannot rid himself of it. It fills him, 
oftentimes with ceaseless misery, sometimes with 
bitter remorse. Is it the creature of human so- 
ciety ? I have already shown that society fills out, 
progressively, the catalogues of actions that are 
right or wrong : but also that it cannot originate 
the distinction itself. Neither can it give to its 
laws that sanction of unconditional obligatoriness 
which never fails to attach to moral right. That is 
why a system of pretended Moral Philosophy, like 
Paley's, which accepts utilitarianism as its ultimate 
principle, is of no more worth or interest than a 



THE OEIGIN OF THE MORAL SENSE 71 

book of municipal police regulations would be. No 
human legislation, no matter how high, can give 
the quality of immediately binding moral force to 
any law of its enactment not previously recognized 
as binding by the conscience. Can the moral, then, 
be derived from external nature ? Nature, outside 
of man, has not the moral ; how could it give what 
it has not itself ? Moreover, the moral constantly 
bids us counteract the natural. It commands us to 
restrain and deny desires and impulses which na- 
ture as constantly bids us gratify without regard to 
anything but opportunity. The moral sense — no 
possibility for other conclusion is left — must come 
from a source outside of nature. 

This same conclusion is reached in yet another 
way. Goodness is clearly the most valuable thing 
there is in the world. We are constrained by our 
moral perceptions to prize it above all else, and if 
need be to sacrifice all else to it, even life itself. It, 
and it alone, gives real dignity and value to life. 
So far as our physical constitution is concerned, we 
are nothing more than highly organized parts of 
the universal mechanism. Even while we subdue 
the forces of nature to our service, we are at best 
nothing more than self-acting switches by which the 
universal energy is turned in a particular direction. 
But our moral nature makes us free, so far as its 
power extends. It endows all our higher actions 



72 THE BEING OF GOD 

with tlie dignity of responsibility. They cease to 
be the results of mere mechanism, or even of that 
intelligence which to a degree all animals share 
with us, and become expressions of true person- 
ality. If good, they are the noblest products of 
existence; if evil, its basest and most harmful 
monstrosities. Goodness, therefore, is the sum- 
mum honum of the universe ; and as such entitled 
to rule and triumph. It must be intended to do 
so by whatever power made all things. Now, as 
there is much evil in the world, and as the powers 
of individual good men are unable to cope with 
this evil, the understanding infers that there must 
be a moral being who in some way will come to 
their aid. >,^To the pessimist, who would deny this 
inference, and says that the triumph of goodness is 
a pleasing but delusive ideal, never to be realized, 
the understanding replies by pointing to history, 
marked by evident progress toward its attainment, 
and by great and terrible days of judgment on 
nations in whom evil-doing had left no sufficient 
powers of moral recuperation. Indeed, all history 
is one continuous day of judgment for the elimina- 
tion and destruction of evil. The great catastro- 
phes of invasions, wars, and revolutions, in which 
empires have been destroyed, dynasties overturned, 
and new nations created, are but the critical points 
of this process, — its great days of execution, so to 



THE OBIGIN OF THE MORAL OBDER 73 

speak. The pessimist who denies this, or doubts 
it, needs to study history and the philosophy of 
history, before he can be reasoned with. But 
others, not pessimists, might say, All this is the 
outcome of the moral order of the universe. Very 
true. But what is this moral order of the uni- 
verse ? Does it inhere in the rocks and waves ? 
Did it spring up in the bosom of chaos ? Was it 
struck out by a fortuitous concourse of atoms? 
Has the chemist found it among his ultimate ele- 
ments of matter? Moral order must manifestly be 
a quality of a moral being ; and hence the admit- 
ted moral order of the universe proves the pres- 
ence of a personal power who conserves moral or- 
der and has its triumph at heart — ay, and will 
secure it. How secure it is another question ; but 
not, I think, a difficult one. Just as we concluded 
that the wise world-builder makes use of what, for 
convenience' sake, we call the mechanical force of 
the world to attain his plans and purposes, — puts 
his final ends, so to speak, into the mechanism 
itseK, to be evolved by it in due time, — so the 
securing of the moral order, i. e. the supreme final 
end of the universe, was provided for in the me- 
chanical constitution of the whole. " All things 
work together for good to them that love God " is 
a dictum of Christian theism that challenges the 
most unlimited application. All things tend in the 



74 THE BEING OF GOB 

long run to conserve goodness and destroy wrong. 
The old feeling against which the book of Job con- 
tends so strenuously, that goodness must prosper 
and wickedness succumb, is after all a true one ; 
it only failed in that it applied to the individual 
and his brief span of life, what God in history 
measures on a scale in which a century is but a 
fraction of the unit. Eight is immortal, and 
wrong is finally self-destructive; the one, because 
it falls in with the course of the world's wisely 
arranged mechanism ; the other, because it lives 
in heedless defiance of it, and is ultimately ground 
to powder by it. 

The conclusion of the argument is that the au- 
thor of the world is not only powerful and intelli- 
gent, but that he is a moral being ; and not that 
only, but righteous. This reasoning, though per- 
haps less direct, or rather less readily grasjoed than 
that of previous arguments, I hold to be no less 
cogent and convincing. It requires a knowledge of 
history, and some insight into the governing forces 
of human life, to estimate it at its proper value ; 
but once appreciated, it is invincible. And that, I 
think, the history-studying world has attested by 
the fact that it has allowed a book like Buckle's 
" HGistory of Civilization in England," in which 
the attempt was made to construe history on the 
principles of mechanical forces alone, to the en- 



TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT EXTENDED 75 

tire exclusion of the moral, to find its place so 
speedily among the interesting failures of our li- 
braries. ^ 

But in addition to this main conclusion, the ar- 
gument demonstrates a number of collateral points. 
And first it proves, what no previous argument 
established with equal clearness, the conscious per- 
sonality of the Maker of all things. Nothing 
unconscious or impersonal can be moral. There- 
fore, pantheism, with its unconscious world-soul, is 
now seen to be an utterly inadequate explanation 
of a universe in which the moral holds so large a 
place. And secondly, it completes the argument 
from physico-teleology. Teleology, as we have seen, 
shows that man is the final end of all material 
things in this lower world ; but it does not show 
what is the final end of man, the purpose for which 
he and all things exist. That question we can now 
answer : All things exist for man, and man exists 
because, a moral being like his Maker, he is de- 
signed to attain perfect goodness, absolute moral 
perfection. That purpose, and that alone, can to 
reason serve as the raison cTetre^ the final end, of 
this world. Thus the teleological argument is very 
much strengthened ; but is it not also so enlarged 
in its scope as to suggest conclusions concerning 

1 Cf. Mulford, The Nation, p. 69 f . : " The history of the world 
cannot he deduced from its geography." 



76 THE BEING OF GOD 

the nature of the world-maker which we could not 
hitherto reach? If the world-maker's ultimate end 
was the production of a moral being, perfect in 
goodness, can we conceive him to design such a be- 
ing to fall back into dust and nothingness ? There 
is nothing absolutely incongruous in the fact that 
you and I die like any beasts of the field. There 
would be nothing absolutely incongruous in the 
supposition that death is the last of us ; that like 
the beasts of the field, and all other organic things, 
we have simply served as means to a higher end. 
For, though moral beings, we are far from perfect ; 
and we can see no absolutely valid reason why any 
being less than perfect should be endowed with 
perpetual existence. It may be best to annihilate 
us altogether, so that no world in the vast universe 
shall know us more. But, when the perfected 
moral man has been evolved, let it be a million 
centuries hence, will the Maker then be content to 
have that perfect being sink back into nothingness? 
Will he be content with an endless succession of 
moral beings, each in turn reflecting his own moral 
perfections, and each in turn crumbling back into 
nonentity? Can that have been the final end he 
had in view when he built the world ? Impossible : 
a succession of morally perfect beings is just as 
unthinkable as a final end, as a beautiful, but ever- 
perishing physical world can be that end. The 



TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT EXTENDED 77 

Maker, when he made moral beings his final end, 
must have had in view the immortality of perfected 
moral beings, — must have looked forward to their 
endless existence for endless purposes. And now 
I ask what does this imply as to his own conscious- 
ness of himself and his nature ? Does it not imply 
that before the foundations of the world were laid 
the Maker was conscious of powers far transcend- 
ing all temporary effects, and of existence stretch- 
ing infinitely beyond all duration ? If the world- 
builder was wise and intelligent, could he have so 
misconceived his own nature, or miscalculated his 
own power, as to adopt for his final end a purpose 
which required infinite time and inexhaustible 
power, if in fact he were finite and limited in power, 
or so conditioned by other beings or forces that he 
could not say, " I am the first, and I am the last ; 
and beside me there is no God." I do not claim 
that this corollary from the moral argument has 
apodictic force. Formal logic may find flaws in it ; 
but I hold that its probability is so high as to be 
practically equivalent to demonstration, and that 
on this ground alone we may rationally conclude 
that the Great Moral First Cause and Wise World- 
builder is a being of unbounded power and free- 
dom, imtrammeled and unconditioned by any other 
force or being whatsoever. 



78 THE BEING OF GOD 

The fourth argument is the famous one proposed 
by Anselm, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. 
It has been named the Outological, because, while 
the cosmological and teleological arguments set out 
from the phenomenal world, this builds on the idea 
of pure being. As given by Anselm, it runs in 
this wise : We believe God to be something than 
which nothing greater can be conceived. But that 
than which nothing greater can be conceived can- 
not exist in the mind only ; for if it did, it would 
be possible to conceive it as existing not only in 
the mind, but also in reality, which would be to 
conceive something greater. Therefore, that than 
which nothing greater can be conceived must exist 
in fact as well as in thought, i. e. God exists not 
only as an ideal, but in reality.^ 

The fallaciousness of this argument has been 
pointed out a thousand times. It was already ex- 
posed by Gaunilo, a contemporary of Anselm, who 
asserted that if one had the idea of an island than 
which none could be more perfect, the same rea- 

1 Anselm' s Proslogion, together with Gaunilo' s reply to the 
above argument and Anselm' s rejoinder, may be found trans- 
lated in the BihUatheca Sacra for 1851, pp. 529 fP. and 699 ff. 
The argument of the earlier Monologion (frequently confounded 
with that of the Proslogion) has more affinity with the cosmolog- 
ical argument. Cf. Ueberweg, Hist. Philos., i. 381 £F. The text 
of the Proslogion cited by Ueberweg is inferior to that given by 
Migne. 



ANSELM'S FALLACY 79 

soning would establish its existence. Anselm re- 
joined that his argument could be applied to noth- 
ing whatever except the object to which he had 
applied it, — the one thing than which no greater 
can be conceived. This object, he said, must be 
without beginning, always and everywhere exist- 
ent, since otherwise a greater might be conceived. 
But this reached only the form of Gaunilo's illus- 
tration ; it failed to meet the real point of his ob- 
jection, which is that the presence in the mind of 
the conception of the highest conceivable object 
does not prove its existence in reality. Nor is this 
the only hiatus in the Anselmic argument. For 
whence comes this conception of that than which 
nothing greater can be conceived ? Anselm simply 
takes it as given — given in the Christian idea of 
God. But how is the conception thus given 
through faith to accredit itself to the reason ? 

Undeniably defective, the argument has never- 
theless possessed wonderful fascination for innu- 
merable philosophical thinkers. It has been felt 
that its author must have seen, or at least distantly 
apprehended, some profound truth, which his lan- 
guage somehow fails to set forth. Hence, although 
discarded for a time through the influence of 
Kant's " Critique of the Pure Keason," it has never 
fallen into the disrepute of mere sophistry. Men 
of the highest speculative powers, Descartes, Spi- 



80 THE BEING OF GOD 

noza, Leibnitz, before Kant, and after him Hegel 
and a host of philosophical theologians down to 
Dorner and Pfleiderer, have endeavored so to in- 
terpret or reconstruct Anselm's reasoning as to 
eliminate its defects. It would be tedious and con- 
fusing to recount these efforts. Let me rather 
simply present that form, due not to one thinker, 
but to many, which commends itself to my own 
mind. 

We shall find the Anselmic argument conclusive 
provided we assume, first, that the thought of the 
highest conceivable object, or what is the same 
thing, the absolutely perfect being, is a necessary 
thought ; that it is not the offspring of an arbitrary 
effort of the imagination, as when I endeavor to 
conceive the most perfect possible island or cathe- 
dral, but that all true thinking presupposes it, and 
can neither escape from it, nor dispense with it. 
And secondly, that every necessary thought (ne- 
cessary in the sense just explained), emerging in 
the process of thinking, and not to be set aside, is 
objectively valid — represents in the mind a reality 
outside of it. 

Grant these two propositions, and the argument 
can be made good, as will appear if we reconstruct 
it thus: We have the idea of the most perfect 
being, than whom none more perfect can be con- 
ceived. As the most perfect conceivable, this being 



THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 81 

is (as Anselm himself pointed out) dependent on 
no other for existence, and possesses all possible 
excellences in absolute perfection. We have this 
idea not because we choose to set it up, but because 
it is inwrought in our mental constitution, and 
comes forth into consciousness more and more 
clearly in proportion as our thinking penetrates 
more deeply into the laws of its own activity. It 
is therefore a necessary idea, and as such objec- 
tively true. Therefore, the absolutely perfect being 
exists, — and that being is — God. 

The argument thus put is logical and conclusive. 
The question now is whether we can justify the 
two interpolated propositions : that the idea is 
necessary, and as such objectively true. 

As to the first, Kant, probably the greatest an- 
alyst and critic of thought and thinking that ever 
lived, says, Yes ; the mind unavoidably forms, or 
rather comes to, the idea of the absolutely perfect 
being, the source of all that is or can be, the total- 
ity of all reality and possibility. The reasoning 
by which he reaches this result is far too extended 
to be here intelligibly reproduced.^ A few words 
of illustration may indicate its nature. 

Did we enter life, not as infants, but as full- 
grown persons, with ready-trained perceptive facul- 

■"■ Cf . Critique of the Pure Reason, the section on the Transcen- 
dental Ideal ; and Caird's Critical Philosophy of Kant, chapter x. 



82 THE BEING OF GOB 

ties and fully developed consciousness, tlie first 
impression of the world we should get would 
be that of a vast collection of unconnected objects. 
It would be like the impression produced by a 
great museum where countless objects lie scat- 
tered about in utter confusion. But such is the 
constitution of the mind that it could not for one 
instant entertain the belief that that impression 
represented the true condition of things. An in- 
wrought conviction that there must be order, nay, 
unity, would immediately assert itself, and set the 
mind to work to discover it. The understanding 
would examine things, compare object with object, 
inquire into their relations to each other, and make 
judgments (predicates) according to the data thus 
obtained. Not a month would pass before enough 
of knowledge had been gathered to verify the in- 
stinctive expectation, and give large glimpses of 
order, full of promise to further inquiry. Now it 
matters not that, entering the world as infants, we 
pass through this initial experience gradually and 
without subsequent knowledge of it. Its essential 
features remain the same : in the first place, we are 
irresistibly impelled to assume the existence of con- 
nection between the apparently unconnected, and 
of unity underneath all mnltij^licity ; and, in the 
second place, we recognize that we know things by 
determining (defining) them, i. e. by what, on the 



THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 83 

basis of experience, we are enabled to affirm or 
deny of them and their relations. The knowledge 
of the ordinary man, it is true, is largely desultory, 
too scanty and superficial to admit of more than 
rude attempts to combine its stores. Consequently 
it does not advance far on the road towards unity. 
Science, on the other hand, not only reduces large 
classes of objects into subordinate unities, but it 
discovers countless interconnections between the 
classes which point to a higher, all-comprehending 
unity. Indeed, it makes it manifest that science 
can never be truly science until it has ceased to be 
sciences. But the reason is not compelled to wait 
for that far-off consummation before it can find rest 
for itself. It finds it, as soon as the need of it be- 
comes imperiously felt, in the idea of the absolute 
unity. This comprehensive, only universal idea is 
not originated by thought ; it emerges, clothed with 
the supreme authority of necessity, when the mind 
contemplates its own activity. It is not a logical 
generalization, dependent for validity upon the 
completeness of induction and the accuracy of 
every one of countless myriads of inferences. 
That is the nature of the highest conclusions of 
what we call the sciences. The idea of the abso- 
lute unity exists potentially in the nature of the 
thinking Ego, although it needs the exercise of the 
analytic reason to occasion its conscious recogni- 



84 THE BEING OF GOD 

tion. It is tlie eTer-active regulative of all think- 
ing, — its guide, stimulant, and critic, all in one. It 
is this to the casual observer of the phenomena 
of existence, and to the scientific investigator of 
nature, — neither of whom has perhaps ever heard 
of it, — as effectually as to the philosopher whose 
analysis of thought and thinking has brought 
him face to face with it. 

But what is the process by which this innate 
function of the reason reveals itself in the form of 
an idea? I find, replies the thinker, that know- 
ledge is determination : that nothing is completely 
known except in connection with the whole of ex- 
istence. For every object is related, not only to it- 
self, to the thinking mind that observes it, to the 
nearer circle of its immediate congeners, but also, 
through these, with everything that now exists or 
ever has existed. To know one I must know all. 
But as I can never fully explore infinite space to 
find the sum of all that is, nor travel back through 
time, along the line of successive existences ad 
infinitum^ or until the beginning of all existence is 
reached, I am constrained to comprehend all that 
now exists or has existed in the concept of all that 
is possible. Complete knowledge of an object 
therefore implies complete determination of it in 
all its relations to the totality of possibility. More- 
over, my partial knowledge is knowledge only so 



THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 85 

far as it rightly apprehends those relations. That 
is to say, I find that all my knowledge, no matter 
how reached, presupposes and rests upon the idea 
of the totality of possibility. The categories un- 
der which all my judgments (predications) about 
objects fall, and from which they derive their 
authoritativeness, are themselves only partial ex- 
hibitions of this universal idea, in which alone they 
coalesce into unity. In the ultimate analysis, my 
knowledge of any object is, in fact, the resultant of 
successively applying to it all the predicates of the 
totality of possibility, and excluding those which it 
refuses. In the logic of the reason there is but 
one major premise, to which all other propositions 
(if their certitude is to be formally demonstrated) 
must be traced up through endless series of pro- 
syllogisms. 

Thus, by analyzing the process and content of 
my thinking, I have found the source and explana- 
tion of that persistent assumption of the unity of 
all things by which, consciously or unconsciously, I 
am ever led. I have found it in an idea which pre- 
cedes all thinking, or, to speak more exactly, in a 
constitutional necessity of my rational nature which 
involves this idea, and out of which upon due oc- 
casion it issues forth into my consciousness as a 
clearly formed concept, marked with a logical ne- 
cessity as strong as the constitutional necessity of 



86 THE BEING OF GOD 

which it is the expression. The individual may 
never consciously think it; but when thought, it 
admits of neither doubt nor question. 

Now, that the idea o£ the totality of possibility is 
the idea of a simple, indivisible whole, not of an 
aggregate of parts, is self-evident. The reason does 
not arbitrarily assume it in despair of proceed- 
ing beyond it, but finds it, and in finding it, ob- 
tains rest and satisfaction. It is the idea of a unity 
which excludes all composite multiplicity. So long 
as a mere aggregation is contemplated, it has not 
been found. It is the idea of one indivisible entity. 

Further, the possibility is not empty logical 
possibility, but the real possibility of existence. 
It is what in philosophy is called the ens realissi- 
mum. It includes in itself all reality, or better, 
the ground of all possibility ; for it furnishes the 
basis for all possible predicates concerning all pos- 
sible existence. 

As the ground of all reality, it is free, self- 
conscious, personal being ; for self-conscious per- 
sonality is to the mind the most real of aU realities. 

And finally, the ens realissimum is unconditioned, 
independent of anything outside of itself ; for as it 
is itself the source and support of all reality, there 
is nothing by which it can be conditioned. 

Thus we obtain as the content of the idea of the 
totality of possibility the concept of an uncondi- 



RANTS OBJECTION 87 

tioned, individual, personal being which contains 
all the elements that enter into our idea of God. 
I add, though I trust it is needless, that the histor- 
ical genesis of the idea of God is another matter 
altogether. 

To this conclusion Kant fully assents. Indeed, 
the very reasoning by which we have reached it is 
only a very brief and (as I would fain believe) a 
more readily intelligible reproduction of his own. 
Nevertheless, he denies that it proves the existence 
of God. The idea of the ens realissimum^ he says, 
is a necessary one ; it is presupposed in all reason- 
ing and regulates it ; but reason gives it only as an 
idea, without requiring that all this reality shall be 
considered as objectively given and as being itself 
an object. In fact, no objects can be given us ex- 
cept objects of sense perception, or " anywhere but 
in the context of a possible experience." 

It is not necessary to repeat what has so often 
been shown, that Kant's limitation of objective 
knowledge to the field of the empirical principle 
leads him into many inconsistencies with himself, 
and that he escapes from its serious consequences 
only by the questionable expedient of distinguish- 
ing between the pure and the practical reason. 
Pfleiderer puts the answer to the negation now 
before us in a nutshell.^ The laws of thought are 

^ Religionsphilosophie, ii. 272 ff. ; ef ., also, i. 155 ff. 



88 THE BEING OF GOD 

neither deductions from, nor generalizations of, ex- 
perience. They antedate experience, and control 
all reasoning about experi-ence. But they manifest 
their correspondence to the laws of existence by the 
constant verifications they receive when the mind 
busies itself about the latter. Celestial phenomena 
occur as predicted ; the electric force transmits 
signs, illuminates streets, moves loads ; and chemical 
properties produce results, such as were expected 
of them by the thinking mind under conditions 
devised by itself. How can this correspondence be 
explained? On no other assumption than that 
both the laws of thought and the laws of existence 
spring from one and the same Being, in whom 
thought and being are one. Not the empty thought 
of God, but the being of God, is the necessary pre- 
supposition of our thought-faculty. 



LECTUEE IV. 

RECAPITULATION. — TRANSITION TO THE ATTRI- 
BUTES. 

When a ship has been at sea for some time, it 
takes the first favorable opportunity to ascertain 
its exact position and the progress it has made. 
It is time to recapitulate the course of reasoning 
we have followed and sum up its results. We 
have passed in review the four principal arguments 
by which the reason seeks to prove the existence of 
God. The first, the cosmological, starts from the 
transitoriness and dependence of all material exist- 
ence. Everything that exists, being perishable, 
had a beginning as it has an end. But if some- 
thing had not existed that had no beginning, no- 
thing could now exist ; for finite existence cannot 
begin without a cause. Therefore something has 
existed from eternity, by which all finite things 
have been brought into being. The only possible 
escape from this conclusion is to deny that anything 
does exist ; but the denier cannot but admit that 
he himself exists, whereby he overthrows his own 
denial. The transitory material universe, there- 



90 THE BEING OF GOD 

fore, demonstrates the existence of a First Cause 
— itself without a beginning, hence eternal, self- 
existent, and of power equal to the production of 
the universe. Besides this direct conclusion, the 
argument suggests two corollaries, the first of 
which can lay no claim to certainty, but only to a 
high degree of probability. It runs thus: This 
first cause is one; for the cosmos, regarded only 
as a vast organism, pervaded by force moving or 
acting under definite and stable laws, discloses to 
the mind ever more abundantly the evidences of 
its unity. It is one consistent whole, and calls for 
one producing cause. The second corollary is 
more absolutely conclusive : The first cause cannot 
be impersonal, physical energy ; for first, whenever 
we see physical energy, our minds cast about for 
a personal being, a will, by whom that energy is 
either generated, directed, or set free ; and sec- 
ondly, no cause can impart what it has not in it- 
seK ; yet we ourselves are products of the First 
Cause, and we are personal beings. Thus we 
have, as the direct result of the cosmological argu- 
ment, the existence of an eternal, self-existent 
Cause ; and by deduction from it, the probable 
oneness, and, may I not say, the certain personality 
of this First Cause. 

Next came the teleological argument. It says, 
Everywhere in the constitution of the universe, we 



BECAPITULATION 91 

perceive design, contrivance, the intelligent adapta- 
tion of means to ends ; but design implies intelli- 
gence and self -determining will, i. e. personality ; 
therefore the universe was constructed by a self- 
conscious personality of inconceivably great intelli- 
gence and intellectual power. Combine this con- 
clusion with that from the cosmological argument, 
and we reach the existence of an eternal, self-exist- 
ent First Cause, who is a personal being, of power 
and intelligence equal to the production of the cos- 
mos. His personality, which in the previous argu- 
ment we already inferred by a sure deduction, is 
here the main conclusion, and henceforth rests on 
a doubly strong foundation. But the other corol- 
lary which we there found, viz., that the First Cause 
is one, is also greatly strengthened ; for this unity 
is once more made highly probable by the fact 
which teleology all but demonstrates, that all final 
causes in nature have man for their ultimate end 
and aim. An infinite series of purposes, converg- 
ing towards one result, can scarcely be conceived 
as the work of more than one mind. Finally, the 
personality of the First Cause, clearly proved by 
teleology, also justifies the further inference that 
the First Cause is not the world-soul of pantheism, 
but a being who is independent of the world ; for 
the universe, regarded as an organism, a vast ma- 
chine, if you will, affords no traces that we can see 
of consciousness or freedom in its action. 



92 THE BEING OF GOD 

The moral argument proceeds in this wise : 
Man has a conscience, a moral sense, the origin of 
which cannot be ascribed to either the individual, 
society, or physical nature ; it must have its source, 
therefore, in a power outside of all these. And 
that this power is the same as that which made the 
world is proven by the fact, attested by the history 
of individuals, communities, and nations, that the 
world as a whole is pervaded by a moral order — 
that its very mechanism is so directed as to cher- 
ish goodness and destroy wickedness. The maker 
of the world, when making it, had moral ends in 
view, and must therefore be a moral being. If 
anything more were needed to raise still higher 
the already double certainty of the personality of 
the First Cause, we have it here ; for nothing im- 
personal, i. e. nothing devoid of self consciousness 
and freely working will, can be moral. Pantheism 
is hereby rendered impossible. The imity of the 
First Cause is also again, for the third time, 
strongly indicated. The accumulated argument is 
too strong to be resisted, although more direct evi- 
dence is yet to come: the power that organized 
the universe so that its mechanical forces subserve 
purposes infinitely various in themselves, yet all 
uniting for the attainment of the highest end con- 
ceivable, the promotion and protection of right- 
eousness, must be one. 



RECAPITULATION 93 

The conclusion resulting from all these lines of 
reasoning is, that there exists one First Cause, by 
whom all things were made ; that he is self -exist- 
ent, and therefore eternal; that he is a personal, 
moral, righteous being, not involved in nature or 
the world, but independent of it and superior to it, 
and of power and wisdom equal to the production 
of the universe. 

The last words of this summing up indicate the 
remaining defect of the argument. It builds on 
the facts of the universe, and cannot get beyond 
their scope. It fails to prove the infinity of the 
First Cause. Not infinity in the temporal sense, — 
that is already expressed in his eternity, — but the 
infinity of his nature, faculties, and properties. In 
other words, it fails to prove the existence of a be- 
ing independent of time and space, untrammeled 
by any imperfection in himself or by any power 
or being outside of himself, unlimited in life, 
power, and wisdom, — in short, absolutely uncondi- 
tioned. And yet no first cause, however great 
and eternal, who is not all this, fills our concep- 
tions of God. 

I suggested in my last lecture, when treating of 
the moral argument, that the ultimate end of crea- 
tion which it revealed — viz.^ the production of per- 
fect moral beings, whose destiny for endless exist- 
ence reason can scarcely doubt — indicates the 



94 THE BEING OF GOD 

world - maker's consciousness of power and inde- 
pendence far exceeding those to be inferred from 
tlie existing universe. In this there is a basis — 
and I cannot but think one of such high proba- 
bility as to amount to practical certainty — on 
which to ground the yet needed element of abso- 
lute unconditionedness. At all events, it serves to 
prepare the mind for the ontological argument, 
and anticipatively to corroborate it. Acce23ting 
the latter argument, — the course of which is yet 
fresh in our memories, — we have found once more 
implicite all that we had previously gained, and in 
addition that which our previous findings lacked. 
The unconditioned being is one, unique, indepen- 
dent, unlimited. There is none above him, — there 
is none beside him. There is no fate, nor other 
form of external necessity, to limit his freedom. 
There is no power, whether of matter or of intelli- 
gent beings, to impede or thwart his will. He is 
unbounded might and wisdom and truth. To sum 
up all in one word, he is absolute life, the ever- 
flowing spring of being, — God. 

To higher certainty than this, I, at least, cannot 
carry the reasoning ; and here I should stop, but 
that at the outset I mentioned another argument, a 
fifth, — the historical. It cannot add to the scope 
of the conclusion, but may serve as a buttress in its 
support. A few words will suffice to indicate it. 



ARGUMENT FROM UNIVERSAL CONSENT 95 

There are several lines of reasoning compre- 
hended under the general title " historical argu- 
ment ; " but the only one of logical value in this 
connection is that drawn from the general consent 
of mankind. Men have always and everywhere 
recognized God or gods. The exceptions, as to 
tribes, if any, are rare, and might without diffi- 
culty be accounted for ; as to individuals, they form 
an insignificant fraction of the aggregate, and are 
even more easily explained. " All men," says 
Aristotle, " have a notion concerning gods." Max- 
imus Tyrius, a philosopher of the second century be- 
fore Christ, says : " Among barbarians there is not 
one who is ignorant of God." A Byzantine writer 
of the third century after Christ, Sextus Empiricus, 
says : " Almost all men, both Greeks and barbari- 
ans, hold the existence of Deity." And among the 
four proofs of the divine existence which he ad- 
duces, one is, " the agreement of all men." It were 
easy to collect many similar utterances, but let me 
finish with one from Cicero in his treatise " On the 
Nature of the Gods " (1. i., c. 16 f.), which not 
only states the fact, but shows its bearing : " What 
nation is there, or what race of men, that has not 
some notion of the gods, prior to all instruction ? 
. . . Since, therefore, this opinion was not estab- 
lished by any institution, custom, or law, and con- 
tinues to command the firm assent of all without 



96 THE BEING OF GOD 

exception, it is impossible not to conclude that 
there are gods, seeing we have implanted (or, 
rather, innate) knowledge of them. That in which 
by nature all agree, must be true." 

Cicero's reasoning is, in the main, that of all 
those theologians who, on whatever grounds, regard 
the arguments we have hitherto considered as in- 
conclusive. They hold that the idea of God is an 
intuition, if not of the reason, of the moral nature. 
I have already given my reasons for not accepting 
this view. The proposition, God exists, is not, 
properly speaking, axiomatic. But the truth it 
declares is one which finds ready access to the 
mind. The thought it expresses is of the same 
nature with the idea of the most perfect possible 
being. In fact, it is that idea cast in popular form, 
and arrived at by popular and often very defective 
modes of thinking. But the very insufficiency of 
the thinking that leads to it shows how nearly it 
has attained to the character of an axiomatic truth. 
And hence it is a corroboration by the unschooled 
mind of the validity of the ontological argument. 
It is the utterance of the socially developed human 
consciousness, — a belief originally, it may be, 
evoked by reflection, confirmed by experience and 
observation, which has approved itself in life from 
generation to generation, and has thus become the 
fixm conviction of the race, a part of the normal 



PRACTICAL RESULT 97 

human mental and moral outfit. That individual 
minds, possibly large multitudes, may cast it from 
them, proves nothing more than that it is not in- 
nate or axiomatic. That it misapprehends God, 
makes him human, cruel, savage ; that it accepts 
not one God, but a hundred, and worships these 
under idolatrous forms, and but too often with re- 
pulsive rites, — shows, no doubt, that they who hold 
it are untutored of mind and spiritually barbarous^ 
but does not alter the fact that they feel their de- 
pendence on higher powers, and have in them the 
germ and starting-point of the loftiest thought to 
which man can rise, — the thought of God. 

It is not improbable that some who have listened 
to the arguments now concluded are disappointed 
in that they do not find their personal sense of 
certitude noticeably intensified, and are therefore 
inclined to sympathize with those who decry the 
value of the reasonings. I suspect that similar ex- 
periences of his own and others have led many a 
theologian to accept the notion that the existence 
of God is given by intuition. But what arguments 
on what subjects can strengthen convictions already 
immovably firm ? Take the famous forty-seventh 
proposition in the first book of Euclid as an illus- 
tration. If by actual measurement you have be- 
come absolutely certain that in right-angled tri- 



98 THE BEING OF GOD 

angles tlie square of the hypothenuse is equal to the 
sum of the squares of the other two sides, what ac- 
cess of certainty can accrue to you from Euclid's 
demonstration ? But the demonstration might 
nevertheless be helpful, if you had arrived at cer- 
tainty without knowing how. And that would be 
a parallel to the case of the ordinary believer in 
God. We are certain, but we also wish to give a 
reason to ourselves for our certainty. We have the 
moral conviction ; but we wish to give it its proper 
place in the whole of our knowledge, and therefore 
refer it to the scrutiny of the reason. And if the 
reason cannot so demonstrate it as to compel the 
assent at every step of every mind, we rest in the 
assurance that as its power in this field has grown 
in the past, so it will continue to grow in the future. 

The remainder of the hour may suffice to pre- 
pare us for a brief survey of the Attributes of 
God. The creeds speak of but one, — almighti- 
ness, — "I believe in God the Father Almighty." 
We are not to infer, however, that no others were 
known or recognized in the early creed - making 
days. This one is brought forward because it pre- 
pares the way for the immediately following state- 
ment : " Maker of heaven and earth." When the 
" Apostles' Creed " was constructing, the interposi- 
tion by Gnosticism of a Demiurge between God 



ATTRIBUTES- CONCEPTION DEFINED 99 

and the world made it highly important to iden- 
tify God and the world-maker. The early creeds 
were chiefly protests against threatening errors, ^ 
and were not meant to be exhaustive exhibits of 
Christian belief. 

A discussion of the attributes involves the pre- 
vious determination of one or two preliminary 
points. In the first place, we need to know what 
they are, or, what is the same thing, whence and 
how we get knowledge of them. The older dog- 
matic systems of the Reformed theologians bring 
forward as many as eighteen ; as Unity, Simpli- 
city, Immutability, Infinity, Immensity, Omnipres- 
ence, Eternity, Life, Omniscience, Wisdom, Holi- 
ness, Justice, Truthfulness, Power, Love, Goodness, 
Blessedness, Will.^ But it is evident that these 
are merely thrown together, pell-mell, without ref- 
erence to any principle of derivation or classifica- 
tion. No reason appears why more should not be 
added, e. g. All-sufficiency, Wrath, Mercy, Long- 
suffering. The root of the difficulty is, that they 
were derived from the utterances of Scripture, 
which were made occasionally and incidentally, 
without a thought of scientific precision or com- 
pleteness. After collecting them all, we could not 
know that they represented all the attributes, or 

1 Cf. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. Ill ff. 

2 See Rothe, Dogmatik, i. 102 n. 



100 THE BEING OF GOD 

how they are related to the essence of the Deity ; 
for as the Scriptures undertake no demonstration 
of the existence of God, so neither do they attempt 
to give an idea of his being or essence, as he is in 
himself, apart from his manifestations of himself 
in nature and history. Hence we must endeavor 
to determine the principle by which we can know 
what attributes belong to God. 

But, first of all, we need a definite conception 
of what we mean when we speak of attributes. 
Etymologically, the word is plain enough. An 
attribute is something attributed or ascribed to 
God, But the thing itself is not thereby defined. 
Speaking loosely, we ascribe existence to God as 
well as omnipotence ; but is existence an attribute ? 
Certainly not. Existence is inseparable from be- 
ing. No existence, no being ; and being can be no 
attribute, because there is nothing but itself to 
which it can be ascribed. We must evidently dis- 
tinguish in thought between the being, essence, or 
substance of God and the attributes which belong- 
to him. An attribute is not a constitutive element 
of the divine being, but an activity or characteris- 
tic of it. It corresponds to what in man we call a 
faculty or quality. Thus thought is a faculty, but 
not a constituent element, of the mind. The fac- 
ulty of thought, i. e. the power to think, cannot be 
a prime element, but must inhere in something ; 



DERIVATION OF ATTRIBUTES 101 

and that in which it inheres is the mind. Thought 
is, therefore, an attribute of mind, and manifests 
itself in action. But there may also be attributes 
of mind which are not faculties or powers, but con- 
stitute qualities by which the action of other mind- 
attributes is affected. You remember the old 
maxim, Errare humanum est, — liability to error is 
characteristic of man. This liability to error is not 
an active power ; it is in itself a quiescent and yet 
very fruitful quality, which but too often vitiates 
our thinking. An attribute, then, is either an 
active faculty or modifying quality of the mind or 
being in which it inheres. 

Now comes the main question : How are we to 
determine what are truly divine attributes ? How 
may we know that we have them all, and that we 
include nothing among them that does not belong 
there ? Manifestly, we must derive them from 
our idea of God, — from the most perfect concep- 
tion of him that we can attain. Of course, this 
involves liability to error. Our idea of God may 
be incorrect and insufficient, and our reasoning 
from it may go astray ; but, mutatis mutandis, 
this is true of all our thinking and reasoning, what- 
soever the subject of their attention. Let us still 
proceed by way of analogy. We have an idea of 
man, and can distinguish the several logical ele- 
ments of which it is made up. Man is a finite, 



102 THE BEING OF GOD 

imperfect being, consisting of material body and 
immaterial spirit. As spirit, i. e. in bis real self, 
be is mind, affections, will, conscience. He is a 
dependent being wbo did not make bimself. He 
tberefore had a beginning, and as to bis material 
part must bave an end, and as to bis spiritual being 
may bave an end, should it so please bis Maker. 
Such is our conception of man, so far at least as 
we now need to complete it ; and from it, granted 
that we had the ideas contained in the terms em- 
ployed, such as mind, will, etc., we could deduce 
the attributes or faculties and characteristics of 
man, even though, were the thing possible, we bad 
never seen a single specimen of the race, and be- 
longed ourselves to another order of intelligent 
beings. Passing by bis physical nature, we should 
say. He is mind ; tberefore the attributes of 
thought, knowledge, and communication belong to 
him. He has affections, i. e. he is receptive of, 
and responsive to, influences of other beings or 
things ; therefore be has the attributes of love and 
hatred, joy and sorrow, delight and disgust. He 
is will; therefore he has power. He has a con- 
science ; therefore he knows both good and evil. 
He is finite, conditioned by time and space, and 
morally imperfect ; therefore be is limited and im- 
perfect in all he thinks and feels and does. 

Now apply this method to our idea of God. We 



BEEIVATION OF ATTRIBUTES 103 

have found God to be the infinite, eternal, right- 
eous, every way perfect Being, — the absokite, un- 
bounded life, and the source of all existence. It 
may be objected that we have reached this idea 
only by reasoning upward from the manifestation 
of his attributes in the world and in our own 
minds ; and that is true. Speculatively, we get 
our knowledge of God from his attributes ; and 
conversely, we deduce his attributes from the con- 
ception we have formed of him. The reasoning 
is circular, but not so as to invalidate itself. It 
is quite possible from a few, say five, data to es- 
tablish a general conclusion, from which then many 
more, let us say twenty; partial conclusions may 
be deduced. And if among these twenty the five 
original data are included, they may reappear in 
modified forms, and invested with greater certainty 
than they had before. It is this that makes the 
increase of knowledge possible. But whether this 
be admitted or not, in now seeking to deduce the 
attributes of God from our idea of him, we do not 
reverse the previously pursued process in order to 
establish the truth of those already found, nor to 
add to their number, although both results may 
happen, but to guard against improper addition or 
omission, and to verify or correct our conception 
of each of them. After this explanation, let us 
proceed. The idea of existence at once suggests 



104 THE BEING OF GOD 

relation to space and time — presence ; but when 
applied to God, the infinite and eternal, this idea 
is at once modified into that of omnipresence. 
From our conception of God as personal being, it 
follows that he has all those distinctions which we 
have already found in man, — intellect, will, the 
moral power, and that susceptibility to be affected 
by other beings than himself (or by himself within 
himself) which constitutes the basis of the affec- 
tions. Hence he has the attributes or qualities im- 
plied in them. He has thought, knowledge, power, 
holiness, love. Again, as the infinite, eternal, and 
perfect Being, he has the qualitative attributes of 
infinity, eternity, and perfection ; and it is evident 
that these must modify all the active attributes 
that belong to him as a personal being, so that, 
e. g., his power must be conceived as infinite, eter- 
nal, and perfect power, and his righteousness as in- 
finite, eternal, perfect righteousness. And finally, 
as infinite, eternal, perfect personality, the attri- 
bute of absolute blessedness must belong to him. 

Herewith we have exhausted the data given in 
our idea of God, from which to deduce his attri- 
butes. Some predicates, now and then brought 
forward as attributes, express conceptions concern- 
ing the divine essence, others are included in those 
we have found. When, for instance, we speak of 
God as the absolute life, we express our highest 



DEBIVATION OF ATTRIBUTES 105 

conception of his essence, the substance of his be- 
ing, the dwelling-place, if I may so speak, of the 
divine Ego. I cannot conceive of it as an attri- 
bute in any sense of the term. There is nothing to 
vs^hich it can belong, — it is the very God. Strictly 
speaking, the phrase " the living God " is as tauto- 
logical as "the living life" would be. When the 
Scriptures or we ourselves use it, it is only to em- 
phasize the idea already contained in the word 
God, — to bring out its profoundest meaning. Sim- 
ilar remarks apply to the term " spirituality." 
When we say " God is spirit," we seek to express, 
as best we can, our conception of the divine sub- 
stance. " God is spirit " and " God is life " are co- 
terminous phrases. Both denote the same object, 
the essence or substance of God, although their 
contraries are different. Nor can Unity and 
Uniqueness be properly classed as attributes ; but 
for a different reason. These terms are at bottom 
nothing more than negations, or rectifications of 
imperfect conceptions of God. As such, they are 
wholly unnecessary as soon as the idea of the infi- 
nite, perfect, personal God has been found. A per- 
sonal being is necessarily one, in the strictest 
sense, excluding not only plurality, but also com- 
positeness, the opposite of simplicity ; and an infi- 
nite being can have no compeers. Will and free- 
dom both appear in omnipotence and every other 



106 THE BEING OF GOD 

manifestation of divine life, and therefore need no 
separate statement. 

The classification of the attributes is difficult. 
No principle has yet been discovered against 
which no objections can be urged. Perhaps the 
same might be said of any attempt at classifying 
the manifestations of spirit-life even on the human 
plane. Fortunately, perfect success is not indis- 
pensably necessary. Yet classification, by promot- 
ing clearness and order, is always an aid to think- 
ing ; so that even an imperfect system is usually 
better than none. The most frequently adopted 
division of the attributes is into absolute and rela- 
tive. The relative are those of which we become 
cognizant when we contemplate God in relation to 
the universe ; the absolute, those we discover when 
we regard him as he is in himself. The latter are 
also called quiescent, as resting in God ; the others, 
transient or operative, as passing from to operate 
outside of himself. It would be easy to find faults 
in this division, but difficult to improve on it. 
Adopting it, the two classes are as follows : Abso- 
lute (or Quiescent) attributes, — Infinity, Eternity 
Blessedness ; Relative (or Operative) — Omni- 
presence, Omnipotence, Omniscience, Holiness, 
Love. 

Time will not permit a full discussion of all the 
attributes. Holiness and Love can be properly 



OBJECTIVE REALITY OF ATTRIBUTES 107 

treated only in connection with the revelation of 
God in Christ, which we cannot here presuppose. 
Infinity, as the expression of God's absolute inde- 
pendence, underlies every other attribute ; as the 
expression of his independence of space limitations, 
it appears in omnipresence. Both it and bless- 
edness may be passed over. Those that remain 
present problems of such wide reach and profound 
interest that they will occupy all the time at our 
disposal. 

A few words, in closing, about the question 
whether the attributes connote objective differ- 
ences in the divine being, or represent nothing 
more than man's subjective conceptions of God.^ 
From Augustine down to the middle of the present 
century, the almost unanimous doctrine of theolo- 
gians has been that they have no real existence in 
God, but are merely logical distinctions made by 
the human mind. It was held that the divine 
essence and the attributes are one and the same 
thing, and that all the attributes are identical. 
What this means, it is not easy to see ; but what it 
is supposed to mean appears from the deductions 
drawn from it. Thus, according to St. Augustine, 
Blessedness, Greatness, Wisdom, Truth, Benevo- 

^ Cf . Dr. Hodge's excellent section on this subject, Systematic 
Theology, i. 368 ff. 



108 THE BEING OF GOD 

lence, are all the same thing. But by parity of 
reasoning, knowledge and will must be the same 
thing ; whence it would follow that whatever God 
knows he also does, and that whatever he knows in 
man he also approves and loves. The denial of 
true distinctions between the attributes was made 
in the interest of the " simplicity " of the divine 
being, by which is meant that it is uncomposite, 
that there is in it no combination of elements, 
whether elements of material or form, of nature or 
essence. This is well. Simplicity is, as we have 
seen, implied in our conception of God as true 
unity. But how does the recognition of truly dis- 
tinct attributes endanger this simplicity ? No one 
conceives of the attributes as representing divisions 
or departments, so to speak, in the divine essence. 
But if one did, — and mediaeval Realism came very 
near it, — the true way to set him right would be 
to show that he misconceived the nature of an at- 
tribute, and its connection with essence. An attri- 
bute is a mode in which the divine life manifests 
itself ; and the only thing it implies about the di- 
vine essence is that it has in it the conditions pre- 
supposed by such manifestation. In other words, 
the attributes simply affirm that the divine essence 
is such that God can know and work and love. 
What composition or combination is there here to 
exclude ? Distinctions are implied, it is true ; dis- 



OBJECTIVE REALITY OF ATTRIBUTES 109 

tinctions between knowing and doing, willing and 
loving, action and non-action, etc. But if God is 
to be regarded as an absolutely distinctionless be- 
ing, they are assuredly right who thence conclude 
that it is impossible for us to attain to any true 
knowledge of him. Take any object of thought, 
eliminate distinction after distinction, and that 
at which you arrive is — pure nothing. The re- 
moval of the last distinction carries with it the 
extinction of the object for the thinker. 

The intention of the old theologians was good, 
but the necessarily logical outcome of their posi- 
tion is pernicious. If there be no distinction in 
God, how can he be a personal being ? The very 
idea of self-consciousness implies a distinction be- 
tween self as subject and self as object. Yet they 
who maintained this view were equally decided 
in their acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity, 
which, if God be distinctionless being, is sheer con- 
tradiction. Modern theology has rightly aban- 
doned the old position. And it has abundant 
ground for so doing in the nature of man himself, 
apart from all philosophical considerations. Or 
are we, in our spiritual nature, composite beings ? 
Is the mind one thing by itself, the will another, 
and the conscience a third ? Is not our conscious- 
ness a consciousness of unity undivided and in- 
divisible ? And yet we know that thought and 



110 THE BEING OF GOD 

knowledge and action are not the same thing in 
us. They are movements of the same ego, but 
different in their character. That the one ego 
exercises all these different functions we know by 
the surest of all tests, — that of consciousness. 
What the ground for them in the essence of the 
mind may be, it will be time enough to investigate 
when we succeed in putting some captured speci- 
men ego under a microscope. If the reality of dif- 
ferent faculties in us does not make us composite 
beings, why should it do so in God ? 

It is possible that this reasoning may be objected 
to as anthropomorphism. Well, then, anthropo- 
morphism let it be. But it is the anthropomor- 
phism of the doctrine that man was made in the 
image of God, which is verified by all our know- 
ledge of the universe. What is all human science, 
so far as it is science, but the result of a successful 
rethinking of God's thought as incorporated in na- 
ture ? The finite mind that, however laboriously, 
spells out the record written in the universe must, 
to the extent of its powers, be conformed in struc- 
ture and modes of action to the Infinite Mind that 
wrote it. 

The God that logically results from the denial 
of objective differences between the attributes is, 
as Dorner says, a God who, while he has shown 
himself to us as power, knowledge, love, has shown 



OBJECTIVE REALITY OF ATTRIBUTES 111 

not himself, but an illusive phantasm. In fact, 
the God that results is not only an unknown God, 
but a dead God, — a God who, if I may say it with- 
out irreverence, is drowned in the ocean of his own 
life and perfections. Or if, to escape a conclusion 
so utterly unthinkable, we describe God as actus 
purus^ sheer activity, pure movement, still we get 
nothing but the God of pantheism, a blind, uncon- 
scious force. 



LECTURE V. 

THE OMNIPEESENCE, ETERNITY, AND OMNIPOTENCE 
OF GOD. 

We saw last week tliat we derive the attributes 
o£ God by analysis of our idea of God. A discus- 
sion of them, therefore, cannot add to the sum of 
our knowledge concerning God. It can only state 
explicitly what we already possess implicitly, and 
bring its several parts into relation to each other 
and to thought generally. It is the latter of these 
possible services that give it its main importance, 
and that will shape the course of our inquiries. 

We begin with Omnipresence. Some theolo- 
gians use instead the term Immensity, ^. e. im- 
measurableness ; while others again, making a 
distinction between omnipresence and immensity, 
apply the latter to the essence of God in itself, the 
former to the being of God in his relations to the 
universe. In either case, the word " immensity " 
may very well be dispensed with. It adds no ele- 
ment which we shall not reach without it ; and its 
very sound is, to my ear at least, suggestive of 
gross, material conceptions of God. 



THJE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD 113 

The idea of omnipresence is by no means free 
from difficulty. What are we to understand by 
it ? Does it mean that God's essence fills all 
space ? That is, in brief, its explanation by most 
theologians, including those of modern days. But 
that definition leads into most inextricable entan- 
glements of thought. If the divine essence fills all 
space, where then is there room for the finite, phys- 
ical universe ? It could only be found within the 
essence of God. We should have to conceive of 
the essence or substance of God as a literally shore- 
less ocean, bearing on its bosom, here, there, and 
yonder, millions of islands, great and small, each a 
world with all that therein is, sin and misery not 
excluded. It is certainly not in this sense that in 
Him we live and move and have our being. But 
even so, the essence of God would not fill all space. 
There would be spaces or gaps within it, wherever 
one of the island worlds was found. And that, too, 
even though we conceived the divine essence to pen- 
etrate all matter, as the atmospheric air penetrates 
it ; for though the densest substance has air in it, 
it is not all air. Though not one atom of matter 
be in actual contact with any other atom, but 
leaves open channels for the air to enter and pass 
through, the atoms themselves must by their very 
definition be conceived as impervious. The only 
possible way I can conceive of God as filling all 



114 THE BEING OF GOD 

space is that of the idealistic philosophy, carried to 
the extreme of denying that there is any finite exist- 
ence at all, — that what we call such is but the 
unreal creation of our own minds. But, says Dr. 
Hodge, though " God fills all space, is not absent 
from any portion of it, nor more present in one 
portion than another, this of course is not to be 
understood of extension or diffusion. Extension 
is a property of matter, and cannot be predicated 
of God. . . . Nor is this omnipresence to be un- 
derstood as a mere presence in knowledge and 
power. It is an omnipresence of the divine es- 
sence." ^ But is not this replacing with one hand 
what the other has taken away ? Of course, the 
divine essence is not material ; but how can it fill 
all space unless it has extension or diffusion in 
some sense of the word? Surely space is not 
filled by nothing ; nor can nothing be said to be in 
space, God is spirit ; but even spirit must be con- 
ceived as having some relation to space. It is here 
or there ; and even the Scholastics, when they de- 
bated how many angels could dance on the point 
of a needle, did not think that two of them could 
occupy the same infinitesimal portion of space, not 
to speak of occupying the spaces already filled by 
the solid material atoms of the needle. 

But, admitting that the divine essence is of such 
1 Syst Theol, i. 383. 



THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD 115 

a nature as to be able to be in space also occupied 
by matter, tbe omnipresence o£ God in that way is 
still not merely inconceivable, but seems impossi- 
ble. For whether we conceive the consciousness 
of God to be centralized somewhere within his es- 
sence, or to be diffused throughout the whole of it, 
in either case only that part of him would be pres- 
ent in this world which filled this part of universal 
space ; in other worlds other parts would be pres- 
ent, but the whole of God would not be present 
anywhere or with anything. Dr. Hodge would 
meet this by a passage which he quotes approv- 
ingly from Augustine, in which that great teacher 
says that '^ the whole of God is in heaven alone, 
the whole on the earth alone, the whole both in 
heaven and on earth ; he is comprehended by no 
place, but the whole of him is in himself and every- 
where." Stripped of its form, that is doubtless 
good doctrine ; but it is with its form that I am 
concerned just now. How am I to harmonize its 
parts with each other, and the whole with the for- 
mula that God's essence fills all space ? The whole 
God assuredly includes the whole essence ; but 
how can the whole essence be in heaven, the whole 
on earth, the whole everywhere, at one and the 
same time ? 

Once more : we conceive of space as unlimited, 
— cannot conceive of it otherwise. If the essence 



116 THE BEING OF GOB 

of God fills all space, his essence must be unlim- 
ited ; but iu that case, how can he be personal ? 
Personality is inconsistent with unlimited — i. e. 
boundary-less — extension in space. To be sure, 
theologians say that extension is not predicable of 
the essence of God ; but the affirmation that he fills 
space is utterly unthinkable, unless, despite of 
every disclaimer, the idea of extension, with which 
we naturally start out, is furtively retained by the 
mind. And therefore, if God is conceived to fill 
space, he cannot also be conceived as a personal 
being. For personality, as I have said, implies 
definition. Whoever understands God's infinity 
to involve his limitless diffusion through space 
must admit that he cannot conceive him to be per- 
sonal. 

I have dwelt on these contradictions in order to 
prepare the way for inquiring into their source. 
Assuredly, God is omnipresent. That is the doc- 
trine, not of the Scriptures alone, but also of the 
reason. It is the necessary sequence of his univer- 
sal causality. The fact stands firm, but the ordi- 
nary explanation of it obscures its truth. The ex- 
planation contains two elements of confusion. In 
the first place, it connects the idea of omnipresence 
with the idea of space ; and in the second place, it 
asserts that the divine essence fills universal space. 
The assertion seems to derive a, good part of its 



DIVINE INFINITY DEFINED 117 

popular strength, at least, from a misconception of 
the term " infinite " as applied to God. God, we 
are prone to reason, is an infinite being ; therefore 
his essence or substance, which is spirit, must be 
infinite. But the word " infinite " is used in two 
very different senses. Etymologically, it signifies 
boundless, limitless. Thus, the edges of this table 
are its bounds or limits. If they were absent, if 
the table had absolutely no edges or limits, it would 
be infinite in length and in breadth. If its sur- 
faces, upper and lower, were likewise absent, it 
would furthermore be infinite in thickness, and fill 
infinite space in all directions. But the word has 
another sense, not only in philosophy, but also in 
ordinary speech A limit often means a weakness, 
a barrier, restraint, an obstacle or adverse condi- 
tion, without the slightest regard to space or spa- 
tial relations. Thus, we confess that our minds 
are limited, meaning that we soon exhaust our 
powers of thought, without thinking for an instant 
of size or extension as connected with mind. We 
say of a person. His mind is powerful, but it has 
its limitations ; meaning thereby that on some 
subjects the strength of his intellect is counter- 
vailed or overborne by prejudice, want of informa- 
tion, or whatever else may hinder it from working 
up to its normal power. The idea of space never 
occurs to us. Now, unfortunately, when we apply 



118 THE BEING OF GOD 

the word " infinite " to the essence of God, we 
almost involuntarily take it in the first, the spatial 
sense. We know so little of immaterial spirit 
that it is difficult to abstract the notion of exten- 
sion, suggested by the term '' infinite," from the di- 
vine essence, and this natural difficulty is greatly 
enhanced when we describe the divine essence as 
omnipresent, a word strongly suggestive of exten- 
sion and solidity. The consequence is, that we in- 
terpret the infinity in a material sense, and con- 
clude that omnipresence means that God's essence 
fills all space, thereby involving our further thought 
in endless confusions and contradictions. "Infi- 
nite," in connection with God, must be taken in the 
other, non-spatial sense. It properly means that he 
is absolutely unconditioned, uncontrolled, — inde- 
pendent of every possible let or hindrance, barrier 
or restraint, that could be interposed from without, 
or spring from imperfections within himself. It 
has nothing whatever to do with space, except to 
say that he is wholly independent of it. It makes 
no affirmation concerning the spatial relations of 
the essence of God, except that it is not subject to 
them. 

It may occur to you that the substitution of one 
definition of the word " infinite " for another does 
not alter the actual relations of God to space. Ad- 
mitted, it may be said, that the word properly char- 



NATUBE OF SPACE AND TIME 119 

acterizes God as the unconditioned, who, as such, is 
above space, one result may be that you avoid the 
contradictions previously spoken of, but another will 
be that you leave the relation of omnipresence 
to space wholly undetermined. That is true ; and 
therefore we must now ask. What is space ? Some 
philosophers, with Kant at their head, maintain 
that both space and time are nothing more than sub- 
jective conceptions of the mind, forms or relations 
imposed on objects by the thinking subject, but 
without objective existence or truth. This doctrine 
is a mixture of truth and error. Its truth consists 
in its correction of the naive belief, in which prior 
to philosophical inquiry we all share, that time and 
space exist in themselves, apart from material ob- 
jects or spiritual beings. The ordinary mind, and 
not without the countenance of some philosophers, 
holds that, were all sensible existence and all think- 
ing mind to be annihilated, space and time would 
still remain. It endows them with independent 
and real, albeit intangible, existence. But this is 
an error. Space and time, as we know them, have 
no existence except as relations of things. Space 
is the relation or form in which things outside of 
self coexist, side by side, at the same time; time, 
that in which primarily things within the self 
(thoughts, feelings, perceptions), and, secondarily, 
things without the self, exist successively, one after 



120 THE BEING OF GOD 

another. Space and time are not realities, entities, 
material or immaterial. Abstract these from real 
existences, and they are nothing. They are univer- 
sal forms of existence, as fluidity and solidity are 
special forms. But it does not follow that they are 
mere creations of the mind, and have no objective 
truth, — nothing answering to them in real things. 
The circle and the triangle are also conceptions of 
mere relations or forms between sides and angles, 
circumference and centre ; and yet it is by reason- 
ing from these relations that we can predict cosmic 
events, eclipses, transits, conjunctions and opposi- 
tions, which are verified to the fraction of a min- 
ute. What does that prove ? Manifestly, that our 
ideas of time and space, although without objective 
reality, are nevertheless objectively true. It proves 
that the forms under which the mind apprehends 
things correspond to the forms under which they 
exist in relation to each other. 

At this point we might be tempted to escape 
from our difficulty by declaring that neither space 
nor time has anything to do with God. But, with- 
out proper qualification, that would only lead to 
others equally pressing. No doubt it is true that 
space and time, as we empirically know them, be- 
ing forms of finite things, exist only in and through 
finite things. Before the creation of the universe 
they were not ; for there was nothing of which they 



SPACE m RELATION TO GOB 121 

could be the forms, or between wbich the relations 
they denote could subsist. Like all the sensible 
creation, they then existed only in the thought and 
purpose of God. They sprang into being, at the 
creative fiat, with the things of which they are the 
forms. That follows, not only from the definition 
of them we have found, but from the impossibility 
of conceiving them as previously existing conditions 
of the Unconditioned. Nor is this conception of 
space and time as created, at variance with the fact 
that we cannot conceive them otherwise than as in- 
finite and therefore eternal.^ For if we regard 
creation, not necessarily our solar system, but any 
part of the vast whole of which we know so little, 
as eternal, — for which much may be said, — all 
appearance of discrepancy vanishes. In that case 
we conceive as eternal, forms which have in fact 
eternally existed. If, on the other hand, creation 
had a beginning, we may interpret the notion of 
eternity, which is inseparable from our ideas of 
space and time, as expressing the universality and 
necessity of space and time as forms of all possible 
created existence. In other words, the ideas of 
time and space, if we abstract from them the notion 
of eternity, give us the forms in which things actu- 

^ The infinity of space is primarily infinity of extension ; but in 
seeking to follow extension in any direction, the mind insensibly 
converts it into duration. 



122 THE BEING OF GOD 

ally are. But the notion of eternity that clings to 
tliem adds the further determination that no created 
thing can exist except in these forms, and that 
therefore there must be in the Creator himself a 
necessity to create what he creates in these forms. 
This necessity is not imposed on him from without ; 
it is a principle of his own perfect being. As it is 
necessary for him, if he create, to create that which 
is good, so, by the same internal necessity, he must 
create it in the forms of space and time. Nor does 
this reduce or limit the possible field of creative 
activity open to him consistently with the mainte- 
nance of himself as the Unconditioned. The only 
species of creature he cannot create is one that like 
himself shall be independent of space and time. 

We can now see that the contradictions in 
which we involved ourselves at the outset resulted 
from defective conceptions of space. We virtually 
viewed it as something existing independently of 
God. We made an application to the Infinite Be- 
ing of a finite relation. Nay, more strangely still, 
we defined omnipresence as meaning that the whole 
fullness of the divine being was contained in that 
which has no independent reality. When we said, 
God's essence fiUs all space, we connected totally 
heterogeneous ideas. We made an affirmation 
which became thinkable only when we surrepti- 
tiously made the divine essence an extended some- 



SPACE m RELATION TO GOD 123 

thing of which space could be a relation. No cau- 
tion not to do this, though repeated a thousand 
times, could prevent it, or ever will prevent it. 
The moment it is said, God fills all space, there 
is given objective and separate reality to space, 
and extension to God, i. e. he is made finite, and 
subject to what, though a creature of his own, is 
assumed to exist independently of him. And this 
is done in supposed compliance with the conception 
of God as the Infinite, because his infinity itself 
is misapprehended. The Infinite is the Uncondi- 
tioned. Hence, when we speak of God as omni- 
present, we mean or should mean that he is uncon- 
ditioned as to his presence ; that he is absolutely 
independent of space, and can be and is personally 
nigh to all his creatures wherever they are. We 
make no statement as to the nature or locale of 
his essence. What we affirm is simply this : that 
whereas man, being subject to the space-relation 
that connects and yet severs all finite things, can 
be in contact with external objects only under the 
conditions of that relation, God as the Infinite is 
free of the relation and its conditions, and is pres- 
ent with all the works of his hands. The ornne^ in 
omnipresence, has no more reference to empty space 
than the same word has in omnipotence. It looks 
only to the whole of creation^ and says that from 
no part or being in it is God absent. Of such a 



124 THE BEING OF GOD 

being and such a presence we can form no mental 
image. The moment we undertake that, we begin 
to anthropomorphize in a manner which destroys 
the idea of God ; but the thought is logically 
deduced from the only tenable and self-attesting 
conception of God that can be formed, and is 
therefore true. 

There are a number of other points usually 
discussed in connection with this topic. Is God 
present in creation essentially or potentially, per- 
sonally or merely operatively ? Some of the ear- 
lier Socinian divines, in order to get rid of the con- 
tradictions involved in the notion of God's essence 
filling all space, taught that as to his essence God 
is in heaven, and that he is omnipresent poten- 
tially, i. e. in power and action. To this it is re- 
plied, and I think correctly, that direct action with- 
out personal presence is something inconceivable. 
We may influence another at a distance by means 
of messages, letters, or books, and we can act on 
distant objects through intermediate causes by 
which we transmit our energy ; but if applied to 
God, this mode of acting would imply distance be- 
tween him and the world, and thus reintroduce the 
space-relation in our conception of him. More- 
over, indirect action is not personal presence with 
the thing acted on ; yet presence is not presence 
unless it be personal. Now as person and essence 



FINAL BESULT 125 

are inseparable, it follows that God's presence 
must be essential, and not merely potential. The 
exclusion of God's personal presence from the 
world is but a single remove from deism with all 
its benumbing consequences and barrenness. On 
the other hand, it may be retorted that the doc- 
trine of the personal immanence of God in the 
world, and with all his creatures, opens the way to 
pantheistic aberrations. It may do so, but only 
when the idea of personality is not duly empha- 
sized. Let there be vigorous Christian theism, 
and no such result can follow. If first we say with 
St. Paul, " The God that made the world and all 
things therein, the Lord of heaven and earth, is 
not far from each one of us," — ^. e. assert the 
personality, — then we may fearlessly add, " for in 
him we live and move and have our being." There 
can be neither deism nor pantheism where these 
two forms of thought are closely conjoined. 

If now you ask how far this lengthy discussion 
has advanced us to the understanding of omnipres- 
ence, I answer, we have learned how to avoid en- 
tangling ourselves in contradictions when we speak 
or think of this divine perfection, in that we have 
ascertained the error in which they originate. We 
have not reached a clear and positive construc- 
tion in thought of the idea of omnipresence, but 
we have learned why we cannot reach it. We can 



126 THE BEING OF GOD 

know that omnipresence must be, and what it must 
be, but not hov: it is. Thinking imder the rela- 
tions of the finite, we have not been able to con- 
strue to our thought the infinite as existing out of 
those relations. AVe have had. a demonstration of 
" the limits of religious thought," but also a fresh 
illustration of the fact that the reason may demon- 
strate the truth of that which it cannot compre- 
hend. And it may not be amiss to add that the 
subject incidentally suggests the great difference 
there is between limitations and contradictions. 
The limitations of the understanding are in- 
surmountable, but quite compatible with partial 
knowledge and practically full logical certainty. 
Contradictions spring from a faulty use of the 
understanding, not from its necessary incapacity, 
nor from anythinof in the thino^s on which it busies 
itself. Contradictions can never be believed, or 
taken on faith, as some would persuade us ; but 
they may be removed by more accurate thinking. 
In no case can two contraries be legitimately de- 
rived from the same truth, no matter how different 
its several phases may be ; for God is true, and all 
his thoughts are true. 

The Eternity of God is that quality of his nature 
that makes him unconditioned by time, as omni- 
presence denotes his independence of space. He 



TIME IN RELATION TO GOD 127 

neither began to be, nor shall he cease to be. 
His existence, whether we try to trace it from this 
moment backward or forward, is endless, and at 
no point under the dominion of time and its 
changes. Thus we see the intimate coherence of 
this attribute with the divine immutability. He is 
immutable because he is eternal. His eternity ex- 
cludes all such changes as growth and decay, in- 
crease in any perfection, or decrease, all second 
thoughts or changes of purpose, in short anything 
that could infer imperfection at any point of his 
existence. But, as Dr. Hodge observes, the idea 
of immutability easily degenerates into that of im- 
mobility. He cites Quenstedt, a Lutheran theo- 
logian of the seventeenth century, as saying that 
the immutability of God " is the perpetual identity 
of the divine essence and all its perfections, and 
wholly excludes every movement, whether physical 
or ethical." The explanation of such an almost 
horrifying sentence is found in the tendency, insep- 
arable apparently from scholastic and speculative 
divinity, ancient or modern, to analyze words rather 
than the thoughts for which they stand. 

There are two points strongly insisted on by the 
old theologians, and by no means obsolete to-day. 
One is that for God eternity knows neither past 
nor future, but is an everlasting now. It is sup- 
posed to be a necessary deduction from God's eter- 



128 THE BEING OF GOD 

nal unchangeableness. In eternity, the scholastics 
were wont to say, there is but one single instant, 
always present, always persisting. And why? 
Because what has been is vanished ; the future has 
no existence except in thought ; the now alone is ; 
consequently, unless eternity is compressed into 
one present now, God is not in possession of either 
past or future, and is therefore imperfect. There 
is force in this reasoning, as you will see if you re- 
call to mind a peculiar species of experience with 
which we are all more or less familiar. I refer to 
the feeling of regret that arises in the mind when 
memory reproduces some pleasant scene or event of 
the past. We think. Would that that happy expe- 
rience were permanent, — that it could at will be 
gone through again under all the same conditions ! 
that I could again enjoy the same scene, enjoy the 
same companionship, be part of the same satisfying 
activities, in precisely the same physical and spir- 
itual setting ! We heave a sigh at the irrevocable 
past. That is, we feel that our inability to make the 
whole of life, so far as it is attractive, a present pos- 
session and experience, is a very great imperfec- 
tion, — that the limitations of time press heavily 
upon us. In this state of mind we are quite ready 
to believe that for God there must be but an eter- 
nal now. 

But let us ask what an eternal now implies. 



TIME IN RELATION TO GOD 129 

What is now f The infinitesimal part of time oc- 
cupied by a single thought or emotion. The in- 
stant that thought is succeeded by another, another 
now has come, and the former has joined the past. 
In other words, now is fleeting in proportion to the 
number and rapidity of thoughts, feelings, percep- 
tions, that succeed each other and produce changes 
in my consciousness. If I am in a stupid, sluggish 
condition, my thoughts are few, and my nows are 
long. If I had but one impression made on my 
consciousness in the course of an hour, I should 
have a now of an hour's duration. If I had all the 
thoughts and feelings of my whole life crowded 
upon my consciousness in one hour, that hour 
would have in it mbi'e nows than I could, count in a 
decade of years. "Now" is measured by but one 
single thought or mental impression. The applica- 
tion of this, if it be lawful to reason analogically to 
God, is plain. If for God there is but one eternal 
now, then he has but one eternal thought, — but 
one never-ending, unchanging consciousness, if con- 
sciousness it can be called. We have saved his 
absolute immutability, but we have lost the ever- 
springing fountain of life, thought, and action 
which make him the Infinite Spirit and the Infinite 
Good. We cannot conceive the perfect mind to be 
destitute of movement and succession, which in the 
finite mind are the sine qua non of conscious exist- 



130 THE BEIITG^ OF GOB 

ence and conscious identity with the self of other 
nows. If there be no succession of thoughts in 
the Infinite, how can he be conceived to pass from 
creating to preserving and sustaining ? 

But how conceive of changes of self-conscious- 
ness in God without making him subject to time ? 
For changing thoughts are characteristic of the 
time-form. I know that this moment differs from 
that which preceded it, because my thought has 
changed. The question brings us back to the na- 
ture of time and space. It can only be answered 
by reference to what we have already found. True, 
it might seem as if it could be met by saying that 
in God all thoughts and activities are simultane- 
ous, — that is, God's now contains, not one single 
thought, but all the infinite number of his thoughts. 
And God's thoughts are not fused in one solid 
mass, so to speak, but stand forth, each in its own 
integrity. The relation between our thoughts is 
one of time ; between God's thoughts it can only 
be conceived of as one of space, for all are simulta- 
neous. In this way we should save the idea of an 
eternal now from the reproach of poverty as to con- 
tents, but not from the charge of presenting us 
with a lifeless God. For the explanation excludes 
movement, which furnishes the prime element in 
our conception of life. God's mind is full of 
thoughts, but the thoughts are stationary. We 



GOD'S RELATION TO TIME 131 

might compare tlie condition of the divine mind, 
suggested by this view, to an ocean whose surface 
is broken into billowy peaks and intervening val- 
leys, and whose profoundest depths are stirred, but 
which has been suddenly congealed by frost into 
immobility, perpetually fixed and made quiescent, 
in the form and semblance of the highest activity. 
The billows are there, and the hidden currents of 
the depths are there, but all as in a marine paint- 
ing, still and motionless. 

From so dismal a conception we are delivered 
by a truer idea of time. We have already found 
that time, like space, considered as the form of 
finite existence, is the product of creative power. 
But as such it must have some substratum in God. 
There must be in God that out of which it can 
spring. In a word, we may boldly say, with 
Pfleiderer, that for God also, as he is in himself and 
apart from his relations to the world, time exists. 
But observe, time, not as we empirically know it, 
a conditioning* and hampering element of finite 
existence, but time in its archetypal form, of which 
the finite relation which we know is an adaptation 
to finite existence. In God it is a relation of him- 
self to himself. 

Supposing, then, that God has in himself a divine 
time-relation to himself, and that there is succes- 
sion in his thoughts and states of self -consciousness, 



132 THE BEING OF GOD 

does it follow that he suffers from that sense of the 
irrevocableness of the past, and the distance of the 
future, which we experience ? And if that cannot 
be, because it would constitute an imperfection, 
how are we to conceive him to have both past and fu- 
ture in present possession ? Conceive it, so as to 
comprehend it, we cannot. But we have in memory 
the means of a proximate comprehension. We can- 
not in actual physical deed relive the past, but 
through memory we can do it mentally and mor- 
ally. We can reproduce the long past thrill of hap- 
piness or the burning blush of shame, not merely as 
memories, but as present experiences. We can feel 
again the exultation of success, or the pain of fail- 
ure, that were experienced years since. There is no 
doubt great difference between memories in this re- 
spect, and also in the vividness and ready respon- 
siveness of our imaginations and emotions ; but we 
all have this power of making the past present in 
some degree. There is reason to believe that mem- 
ory may be equal to the reproduction of a long life 
in full detail in a moment, so that the soul lives the 
whole over again in an instant. Who shall say that 
hereafter that power, which now manifests itself only, 
so far as I know, in persons on the verge of disso- 
lution, may not come into constant exercise? — that 
we, too, shall not be freed from the limitations that 
now make the past a lost possession ? In some analo- 



TIME-EELATION OF GOD TO UNIVERSE 133 

gous way, we may conceive God to have not only 
the past, but through his unlimited knowledge the 
future also, forever in present possession. And 
not merely as a memory, but as action. Even we 
live the past in all that pertains to the immaterial 
seK. The physical acts and enjoyments are mere 
memories. But in God the physical does not ex- 
ist. All is spiritual, and therefore capable of end- 
less persistence. 

The other point to which I alluded, as insisted on 
by the old theology, is the correlate of that now 
considered. That dealt with the idea of time in 
relation to God as he exists in himself ; this deals 
with it in connection with his relations to the finite 
universe. That said, God stands outside of time ; 
this says, and by consequence he sees even things 
in time without reference to time and its succes- 
sion, as present. This consequence, however, does 
not follow. God might be without even the ana- 
logue of what we know as time in himself, and yet, 
as he treats the world under the space-relation in 
which he placed it, so he might treat the world 
under the conditions of time which he himself im- 
posed. Although God be timeless, he cannot but 
know whatever there is in time to be known, see- 
ing he himself is time's creator. Therefore he is 
able to see the world in time ; and it cannot be 
that he sees or treats it otherwise. If he thought 



IM THE BEING OF GOD 

of the world to-day not only as it is, but also as 
being wbat it was in the paleozoic time, and as it 
shall be one thousand years hence, he would not 
think the truth of it. He would think of condi- 
tions that do not exist, as existing. His thinking 
would not be true. When as yet the universe had 
no existence, he could not think of it as already 
created. He could only think of it as existing in 
his own purposes. He cannot look upon the inno- 
cent infant of to-day as forty years hence he must 
look upon the crime-stained man ; nor can he re- 
gard the home-returned prodigal as he regarded 
him when in the far-off land he wasted his sub- 
stance in riotous living. God is indeed omnipres- 
ent and omniscient ; sees all things and knows all 
things at once ; but he is also the eternal Truth, 
who must see and know things as they are, not the 
past as now present, nor the future as already in 
real existence, but everything in those time-rela- 
tions which he imposed upon them. The divine 
immutability — this is the positive outcome of our 
investigation — must be defined so as not to con- 
flict with the divine life and truth. What it af- 
firms is, that God in his being and character is 
unchangeable, — the same to-day, yesterday, and 
forever. It attributes to God absolute identity in 
all his perfections, — unchanging life, unchanging 
purposes, unchanging goodness. 



THE OMNIPOTENCE OF QOD 135 

Let us now direct our attention briefly to the 
Omnipotence of God. As the Infinite Life, God is 
necessarily conceived to be omnipotent. By this 
we mean that his power is unlimited, unobstructed 
either through its own insufficiency, or through 
any form of existence outside of him. Or any ab- 
stract necessity over him. Whatever necessity 
there is for him is grounded in his nature, as the 
necessary being ; whatever limitations there are 
for him are self-imposed. They are so far from 
being imperfections that they are the expression of 
his perfections. The subject is closely connected 
with the freedom, the unrestrained self-determina- 
tion, of the divine will, which, however, I must 
simply take for granted. Any consideration of 
it would carry us much too far for our time. 

The commonest mode of translating the word 
" omnipotence " is to say that God can do what- 
ever he wills to do. And this is very right ; only 
we need to be on our guard against separating the 
power of God from his other perfections, — against 
setting it up on a throne of its own, as it were, 
and making a new God of it. It is doing this that 
has so often led to absurd questions and disputes as 
to whether God can do this or that. Can God do 
evil? Can he leave two points where they are, 
and yet shorten the straight line that connects 
them ? Can he make a man who shall be able to 



136 THE BEING OF GOD 

live and work in two places at once? Can he 
make that undone which has been done? Ques- 
tions like these sometimes perplex the well-mean- 
ing but untrained mind, and they frequently con- 
stitute a large part of the popular infidel's stock in 
trade. But even in the Schools similar questions 
were once debated, — &- [/> there was once quite a 
prolonged, learned, and serious discussion of the 
question. Whether God can do the impossible ? Is 
not the impossible included in the omne f God 
can do whatever he wills, why not this ? The an- 
swer is, The question is absurd. No one even can 
will to do what on the face of it is nothing but 
a logical contradiction. Suppose the impossible 
done, would not that show that the impossible was 
still not done ? Certainly that which was done 
was not impossible, for it has been done. Such 
questions are mere verbal quibbles, in which no 
real thought is expressed. It is different with 
such a question as whether God can do evil. 
The answer must be, No. Not, however, because 
he has not the pov/er, but because he has not the 
will. The impossibility is not physical but moral. 
It is only generalizing this answer to say that God 
cannot will to do anything at variance with his ab- 
solute perfection. He cannot will that which his 
reason, his wisdom, or his goodness do not approve, 
and therefore he cannot do it. His will is not ar- 



THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF TRUTH 137 

bitrary, as ours too often is, bent on an object with- 
out regard to anything but the gratification of a 
desire or a whim. His whole nature is perfectly at 
one with itself, not, as ours, divided against itself, 
— conscience and the understanding on one side, 
the passions on the other, and the stronger force 
detarmining the will. Every divine volition is the 
expression of the whole harmonious divine nature. 
It is not a question of power, but of truth, — truth 
to himself, to his work, to the laws he has im- 
pressed on nature. 

But this suggests the question, whether God 
himself is not the author and creator of truth, and, 
if he be, what there is to prevent him from making 
that true and good which now is false and bad. 
His power as absolute power, it is thought, must 
involve this. God, said Descartes, did not will the 
three angles of a triangle to be equal to two right 
angles because he knew that it could not be others- 
wise, but it cannot be otherwise and is true because 
he so willed it. Theologians have in the same 
way made God the creator of moral law. God, 
they said with Abelard, does not will or do any- 
thing because it is right, but it is right because he 
wills or does it. Worse still, so devout a man as 
Stier takes the ground that right depends on the 
will of God, and that therefore those actions re- 
corded in the Old Testament which, judged by or- 



138 THE BEING OF GOD 

dinary standards, are immoral, were right. In this 
way God's omnipotence was made, not the creator 
only, but the arhitrary creator, of whatever is right 
and true. If that view were right, the absurd 
questions of which I spoke a moment since would 
be legitimate. 

A distorted truth underlies these speculations of 
Descartes and Stier and others. And they are not 
answered by those who maintain that all truth, 
physical, mathematical, moral, exists apart from 
God. Where or in what could it exist ? Truth is 
not an entity that can be conceived to have a being 
of its own. To say that it exists in the nature of 
things solves nothing. It does exist in the nature 
of things ; but where did the things come from, 
and who gave them their nature, or marshaled 
them in relationship to each other? Truth can 
have no other source than God. That is the truth 
in the speculations adverted to. From God comes 
all that is, and, sin excepted, as it is. But truth 
is not an arbitrary creation of the Almighty's fiat. 
It is not a scheme thought out by God, and then 
impressed on finite things. Truth, all truth, is 
the reflection of the divine nature, equally eternal 
and unchangeable as that nature. God could not 
make the triangle other than it is, because it con- 
forms to the necessary thinking of his own mind 
in the region of abstract mathematics. He could 



THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF TRUTH 139 

not have made that right which now is wrong, be- 
cause it would have made his own work abhorrent 
to his moral nature. He did not, and to finite 
creatures in a finite world could not, impart all 
truth ; but what he did impart is true forever. 
And it is this necessity of his nature, to be true to 
himself, that constitutes the only limit to the free- 
dom of his will. His self-determination is none the 
less complete that it cannot determine anything 
against itself. 



LECTURE yio 

THE OMNISCIENCE, HOLINESS, AND LOVE OF GOD. 

The attribute of Omniscience, the last of those 
that present serious difficulties, is perhaps the most 
difficult of all. 

Omniscience is God's perfect knowledge of all 
that is or can be, however related to time and 
space. It is, as we shall see, closely related to his 
perfect wisdom. Both are embraced in the divine 
intelligence : knowledge is the apprehension of 
things as they are in themselves and in their mu- 
tual relations ; wisdom is the faculty which adapts 
means to ends. 

God's omniscience is a necessary deduction from 
his perfect self-knowledge, on the one hand, and, 
on the other, from the fact that all that is or can 
be has its source in him, and is thus an object of 
his self-knowledge. God knows himself perfectly, 
because his personality is perfect. In the know- 
ledge of himself, i. e. of his nature, he knows all 
necessary, eternal truth, as distinguished from what- 
ever is the offspring of his creative will. The ori- 
gin of necessary truth has already been glanced at 



THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD 141 

in connection with omnipotence. Mathematical 
and moral truth, and whatever truth lies at the 
foundations of all physical relations, such as those 
of mechanics and chemistry, do not, and never did, 
exist independently of God ; but neither were they 
created by the will of God. They exist in the na- 
ture of God, as principles, relations, modes of ac- 
tion, which God himself can no more change than 
he can change his nature. They are eternal and 
necessary, because they are determinative elements 
in the nature of the eternal and necessary being. 
All these truths God knows through his self -con- 
sciousness, which is not like ours partial and often 
dim, but absolutely perfect, embracing his whole 
self with all it contains. Now knowledge, properly 
so called, is not merely knowledge of separate, un- 
related facts, such as a person would have of geology 
if he could recognize and name every specimen of 
rock in a cabinet, but know nothing of their com- 
position or the processes of rock-formation. If 
one knew all the facts in the world, but knew 
them only in that way, his mind would be no more 
than a scrap-bag of knowledge. God's knowledge 
is science, in the perfect sense in which we can 
never apply that word to any knowledge of ours. 
He knows every particular thing in its relation to 
the principle from which it springs, and he knows 
the principle with all that is contained in it. His 



142 THE BEING OF GOD 

knowledge is an organic whole in whicli unity is 
seen simultaneously witli all the possible multipli- 
city of divisions and combinations in which it man- 
ifests itself. Hence God knows not only what 
actually is in himseK, but all that could possibly 
be produced by himself. For everything he pro- 
duces must, in proportion to its likeness to himself, 
have more or less of his own characteristics in it. 
Of all the creatures we know, man has most of 
these, both in number and in variety and intricacy 
of combination ; and what we call inorganic matter 
has least. No created thing, however, can be en- 
tirely destitute of them, or indeed be anything else 
than a compound of them, so to speak ; for even 
God cannot impart that which he has not in him- 
self. Matter, therefore, if it be created, must have 
derived its constituent elements from God himself. 
What those elements are, we do not know ; but we 
do know that the properties of matter conform to 
mathematical, chemical, or other forms of eternal 
truth. Therefore, since everything God could 
make must be the outcome of what there is in him- 
self, and since he knows all there is in himself and 
all its possible creative results, it follows that he 
knows not only that which is, has been, or shall be, 
but all that possibly could be, even that which he 
will never will to be. This knowledge theologians 
designate as God's necessary knowledge, because it 



THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD 143 

Is independent of creation. He had it when as yet 
he had created nothing. Before the foundations 
of the world were laid, he knew all the infinite pos- 
sibilities contained in himself, and all their conse- 
quences. It was then a knowledge of what we may 
call world-ideas or world-plans, not one of which 
had objective existence. When out of the infinite 
number of possible worlds or universes one was cre- 
ated, and brought into actual existence, then the 
knowledge of that one became objective. God did 
not cease to know its idea or plan as idea, for his 
knowledge cannot perish ; but he thenceforth also 
knew it as realized and objectively existing. The 
notion that God, as eternal and immutable, does 
not know things as past, present, or future, has 
already been considered, and needs not to be gone 
over again. God may be said to have a double 
knowledge of the universe : First, as eternally ex- 
isting in his mind as an idea, and secondly, as exist- 
ing in time and space. But not to enlarge on this, 
let me enunciate the conclusion to which the pre- 
ceding reasoning leads. It is this : If God through 
his self-consciousness necessarily knows all the in- 
finite possibilities included in his creative might, 
and knows them in full detail, from their first 
beginnings to their last results, then he knows all 
he actually did create with equal comprehensive- 
ness. Not a lily blooms, not a sparrow hungers, 



144 THE BEING OF GOD 

not a hair falls from human head, but he knows it. 
The whole course of history, and all its results, lay- 
open before him previously to creation, and lie open 
before him now. 

But here we encounter what is one of the hardest 
problems in theology. It is not difficult to under- 
stand how God can know, not merely as a matter 
of present reality, but of eternal prevision, the 
whole working of the physical universe as physical. 
He knows its constitution, and the precise working 
of its forces under laws inherent in them, or im- 
pressed upon them through their mutual relations. 
Although the mode of his knowledge, as eternal, 
and its infinite extent, be incomprehensible, yet of 
its possibility we can form a sufficiently clear idea. 
We ourselves reason from causes to effects, with 
entire confidence that results will be such as we ex- 
pect. But the universe contains not only physical 
existences, not only organic and animal life, but 
free agents, personal beings, with power to deter- 
mine their own course of action, and even by inter- 
ference to divert the mechanical energies of the 
world from their natural courses, and direct them 
to ends of their own. How could God know what 
they would do, and what the result of their doing 
would be, both on themselves and on physical 
nature ? We are certain indeed that he knew all 
the possible alternatives open to their choice ; for 



OMNISCIENCE AND THE CONTINGENT 145 

they, too, are his creatures, the products of his 
power, constructed on those same eternal, neces- 
sary principles that are inherent in his own nature. 
But could he also know which, of all the possibili- 
ties that would lie open to each free being, that 
being would select and pursue ? Pursue, I said ; 
as if persistence in a course once selected were 
certain, which it was not. Man's will, we know 
but too well, is often sheer arbitrariness, — mere 
unreasonable caprice. This fact augments the dif- 
ficulty. It implies that there were not only unnum- 
bered possibilities of reasonable courses, steadfastly 
maintained during life, but that these might have 
to be multiplied by equally innumerable capricious 
actions possible to each individual. In short, we 
have reached a point where it seems that we must 
either limit divine foreknowledge or deny the free- 
dom of intelligent beings. 

To deny the freedom of the will would plunge 
us into a sea of troubles, each one practically more 
serious than that now pressing on us. If our wills 
be not free, if they have not the power of willing 
the contrary, then for us all responsibility is at an 
end. Our freedom is a mere delusion. Our ac- 
tions, the bad as well as the good, can only be im- 
puted to the power that directly or indirectly con- 
trols our volitions, be it God or fate or matter. 
We need not deny that human freedom is in many 



146 THE BEING OF GOD 

instances terribly weighted by inherited predisposi- 
tions, or by the destrnctive effects of habitual evil- 
doing. It is not in any one of us what it would 
be in a being sinless himself and sprung from sin- 
less ancestors. But all this, though it makes right- 
doing difficult, does not destroy the consciousness 
that we are free, or the conviction that right-doing 
is possible. 

The alternate means of escaping the contradic- 
tion, that of assuming that with regard to future 
actions of free agents the divine omniscience is 
limited, is adopted not only by Aristotle, and many 
of the Socinian and Arminian divines, but also by 
Martensen, Rothe, and some other modern theolo- 
gians. But can that be regarded as a satisfactory 
conclusion ? Let us see what it does and does not 
imply. It does not seem necessarily to imply that 
creation was a species of divine experiment, the 
final result of which was not certainly known to 
God ; so that we should have to conceive of him 
as now watching the working of the universe, as 
the chemist watches the result of a hitherto untried 
combination of elements. That God was from 
eternity absolutely certain of attaining the final 
end he proposed to himself in creation is as firmly 
held by the theologians to whom I have alluded as 
by other Christians. They believe, too, that abso- 
lute, infallible Wisdom so planned creation as to 



OMNISCIENCE AND THE CONTINGENT 147 

adjust every part, relation, and force to the final 
end to be attained. Nor was the freedom of free 
intelligences, and the possibilities therein involved, 
overlooked in the plan. On the contrary, it is evi- 
dent, even to our understanding, that the education 
and development of beings endowed with freedom 
is the central thought in the ultimate end and pur- 
pose of the whole universe. So far from being un- 
considered, they and their freedom must have been 
the all-controlling element in the planning of di- 
vine wisdom. But does it necessarily follow from 
this that all their future volitions and actions were 
foreseen ? In one sense, yes ; in another, no. It 
does follow that God must have eternally known 
all the possibilities of finite free will and actions ; 
and not only the possibilities of all free intelligence 
en masse^ but of each individual in particular. 
He must have known the precise bounds of all 
those free actions, and have provided for their con- 
tingent effects on the working of nature and the 
realization of his ultimate purpose, by compen- 
sating, counterbalancing, and overruling agencies. 
This much unquestionably follows from the abso- 
lute certainty that divine plans are perfect and 
infallible. But it does not necessarily follow that 
God must have foreseen the free decisions of each 
and every free being. The certain realization of 
the divine purpose is sufficiently guaranteed by his 



148 THE BEING OF GOD 

knowledge of the limits of the coutingencies in- 
volved in free actions ; and it might be argued 
that the glory of his infinite wisdom is more en- 
hanced by the presence of contingencies than he 
could add to that of his knowledge by piercing 
through to their secrets. 

The two ways of solving the problem, usually re- 
sorted to, seem to me to rest on an entire misappre- 
hension of its origin. God's foreknowledge, we 
are told, has no causative effect on the determina- 
tions of the created will, so that, e, ^., his foreknow- 
ledge of Iscariot's treachery caused him to commit 
it. Of course not. That result would follow, to 
be sure, from the doctrine that in God there are 
no real distinctions between his being and his attri- 
butes. If that were true, his knowledge and will 
would be identical, and to know a thing would be 
to will and produce it. But that position we have 
abeady rejected as untenable. I may foresee that 
A B will decline the bishopric of X, to which he 
has been called ; but does that leave him less 
free to accept it ? And though my knowledge 
were absolutely certain, it would affect A B's free 
will no more than if it were a mere conjecture. 
God's foreknowledge, as such, absolutely certain 
though it be, is in no way incompatible with hu- 
man freedom. 

The other solution commonly proposed is that 



SOUBCE OF GOD'S KNOWLEDGE 149 

in God there is, properly speaking, no foreknow- 
ledge. His knowledge is timeless — eternally pres- 
ent. He knows and sees all that has been, is, and 
shall be, in one ever-present now. From all eter- 
nity he sees every volition of every free agent as 
actually present and bringing forth its results. 
The difficulty of conceiving how he could foresee 
the contingent volitions of free beings is one of 
our own making. It has no ground but our ina- 
bility to conceive of God's activities otherwise than 
under the form of time. But this endeavor touches 
the real difficulty no more than the other did. 

That which gives rise to the difficulty is the 
fact that we are compelled to find the source of 
God's eternal knowledge in his self-consciousness. 
All his knowledge must be knowledge of himself. 
When as yet the earth was not, nor the heavens, 
nor any created thing or spirit whatsoever, what 
was there for God to know ? His own infinite full- 
ness, — himself, what he had in himself, and all 
that might possibly become through himself. Ex- 
ternal existence there was none. He was the All, 
— the Only ; the Ego without an external non- 
Ego. As absolute Spirit, he had not even a body 
which he could contemplate as in some sense objec- 
tive to himself. All his knowledge, being self- 
knowledge, came not, like ours, through eye and 
ear, or any analogous channels, but through self- 



150 THE BEING OF GOD 

inspection or self-contemplation. Now, we can 
see with sufficient clearness that in this way he 
could know everything except how free wills would 
decide. The external universe, if free agents be 
left out of the account, is the incorporation in ma- 
terial and physical forms of his own thought and 
will. It is not self -deter mining, but moves in un- 
failing conformity to laws which are characteristics 
of his own nature. He knows exactly what every 
energy he has put into it can do, because it is his 
own energy ; he knows exactly what it will do, be- 
cause it is still subject to his own will. But his 
relation to the free agents of the universe is in 
one respect essentially different. They, too, are 
embodiments of his thought and will. The power 
they possess is his ; they live, and move, and act, 
because he furnishes them with life and strength. 
So far they, like all other parts of the whole uni- 
verse, are still contained within the divine self-con- 
sciousness. To know what they can or will do, the 
Maker has but to turn his thought in upon himself. 
But by making them free, self-determining beings, 
he enabled them to turn their power and activity 
into whatever direction open to finite beings they 
please. His own mental and moral characteristics 
are in them, just as his mental characteristics are 
in physical nature, but under conditions of free- 
dom. Just here our problem emerges. God could 



AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM? 151 

know all physical nature, physical man included, 
by self -inspection. He could know man as spirit, 
offspring of his own Spirit, in the same way. He 
could know all there is in him, and all that could 
possibly come from him. But how could he know 
what actually would come from him ? How could 
he know what would be the volitions of the free 
will in any particular instance ? Is not the will, 
by its freedom, lifted out of the range of the di- 
vine prevision? This is the problem. And you 
see it is not solved by saying that God's know- 
ledge is not foreknowledge, but knowledge of all 
things as ever present in an eternal now. We 
have already found that when the Infinite deals 
with the finite, he must take it as finite, under the 
forms of time and space. If the knowledge of an 
act not yet performed is not foreknowledge, what 
is it? But, not to insist on that, to have any 
bearing on the question, the offered solution must 
mean that God eternally knew every decision of 
every free being, because he eternally beheld the 
very making of those decisions; but in that case 
he derived his knowledge, not from himself, but 
from the objective act eternally present to him. 
If God's knowledge is and always was knowledge 
not derived from the observation of any external 
object, but from his own self -consciousness, how 
could he know that which his plan necessarily left 
indeterminate ? 



152 THE BEING OF GOD 

I do not see how the problem can ever be solved. 
Let no one, however, misinterpret its consequences. 
It does not impair the absolute independence of 
God because, admitting that his foreknowledge 
was and is limited by the exclusion from it of the 
free volitions of intelligent beings, the limitation 
was self-imposed. It results from the exercise of 
creative omnipotence. Nor does it tend to shut 
God out from the world if foreknowledge of con- 
tingent, free actions be denied him. If we have 
gained nothing more by our inquiries, we have at 
all events obtained a firm foundation for the doc- 
trine of the divine immanence in the universe. 
Deism, in removing God to heaven, or in some 
way locally separating him from creation, must 
conceive of him as deriving his knowledge of the 
world as it is by observation of it as something 
wholly outside of himself. It must endow him 
with something analogous to our perceptive facul- 
ties. And it cannot conceive of any divine influ- 
ence on the mechanical course of the world with- 
out interference in the manner called supernatural. 
But in finding in the divine self-consciousness the 
source of all divine knowledge, because all things 
abe and ever must be created emanations from him- 
self, we have found a rational conception of the 
mode in which the creator and the creature are 
connected. We have found that, as Sir Isaac New- 



AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM? 153 

ton expressed it, God is the sensorium of the uni- 
verse, i. e. the conscious centre of the whole crea- 
tion, where everything thought, felt, or done is 
immediately perceived. To put it in other words, 
God's self -consciousness is at the same time world- 
consciousness. He is the immanent Spirit, the 
truly omnipresent and omuiactive in all life and 
existence. We have at last reached the full mean- 
ing of the words, " In him we live, and move, and 
have our being." And this result stands steadfast, 
even though we feel ourselves constrained to reject 
the denial of divine foreknowledge of yet unmade 
decisions of free agents. 

So far as the problem is concerned, I think a 
satisfactory solution unattainable. But though I 
am not disposed to overrate the consequences in- 
volved in the conclusion to which it seems to lead, 
I cannot bring myself to accept it. To suppose the 
acts of free agents unknown to God before they 
are performed seems to carry with it the necessity 
of regarding all that part of the eternal plan which 
relates to the spiritual history of mankind, their 
education and redemption, as hypothetical. It pre- 
cludes the possibility of God's choosing individual 
men for special service. How could Abraham, 
Moses, David, Isaiah, be appointed leaders and 
teachers of the world, when their moral self-deter- 
minations could not be foreseen ? Yet the Scrip- 



164 THE BEING OF GOD 

tures are full of such pre-appointments, and it is 
impossible to see how the spiritual training of the 
world could be carried on without them. How such 
foreknowledge can coexist with freedom we can- 
not know. That it does coexist is testified to by 
the universal God-consciousness of mankind. The 
religious consciousness finds its own experiences 
expressed by the psalmist when he says : — 

" O Lord, thou searcliest aud ktiowest me. 
Thou knowest my dowiisitting and uprising ; 
Thou notest m.y thoughts before they are. 
My doing and my resting thou dost sift, 
And all my ways are open to thee. 
For there is not a word on my tongue 
But, lo ! thou Lord knowest it wholly. 
Thou compassest me before and behind. 
And holdest thy hand over me. 
Too wonderful for me is sueh knowledge ; 
It is high : I cannot attain unto it." 

We have now finished the discussion of those 
attributes into which our conceptions of time and 
space on the one hand, and the relations of God to 
the physical universe on the other, enter so largely. 
There remain those in which his moral characteris- 
tics, and their relations to moral being, manifest 
themselves. A full consideration of these would 
be of extreme interest to me, and I doubt not to 
you also. They carry us out of the rarefied atmo- 
sphere of difficult metaphysics into the more genial 



GOD'S MORAL ATTRIBUTES 155 

air of immediately practical relations. They fur- 
nish the basis of ethics, and of the doctrine of the 
divine self -manifestation in providence, history, and 
redemption. But, as this fact sufficiently shows, 
they cover ground much too broad to be trav- 
ersed in the time at my command. I must, per- 
f<5tce, content myself with a bare outline, such as 
the few remaining moments of this hour will per- 
mit, of their relations to God, to each other, and 
to moral beings. 

As leading attributes, I named Holiness and 
Love, containing in themselves many others usu- 
ally separately enumerated. But these two are the 
fundamental notes of God as a moral being. 

First, then, let us briefly consider Holiness. It 
belongs to God as the perfect moral being. We 
have seen that moral truth, while not the creation 
of God's will, is a determinative element of his 
nature. He is moral truth. Now, when we at- 
tribute holiness to him, we mean that God, in the 
absolute freedom of his will, is in perfect harmony 
with himself, — that there is not the shadow of a 
schism in his being ; that all he thinks and wills 
and does is in perfect yet free and unconstrained 
conformity with the moral elements of his nature. 
He is righteous, just, and true, — in one word, holy. 

Being holy, as just defined, it follows that he 
must maintain, and guard with unsleeping care, the 



156 THE BEING OF GOD 

ultimate moral purpose lie had in view in the cre- 
ation of the world. What that purpose was, we 
have already found. It was the production of a 
class of finite, morally perfected beings, — the erec- 
tion of a kingxlom of righteous personalities, not 
merely created in his ow^n image, but permanently 
and wholly conformed to it. It is true, we inferred 
this purpose only from our own world ; but we are 
not thereby obliged to limit our conclusion to this 
world. If other worlds exist, and other classes of 
intelligent beings in them, the ultimate purpose of 
their creation cannot be at variance with that we 
found for this. There may be diversity, but there 
must be unity throughout the universe. The ulti- 
mate kingdom may have varieties of moral beings, 
but it must be one kingdom of righteousness, as its 
King is one and holy. But in either case, whether 
there be moral beings other than man or not, the 
whole universe must have one single final end ; and 
that end God, the holy one, must maintain and 
guard. 

Hence it follows, further, that whatever free 
ao'ent sets himself ag-ainst the moral order of the 
universe, — the witness of which he has in his own 
conscience, and the knowledge of which is con- 
stantly imparted to him, in social life, and by 
God's messengers, prophets, apostles, preachers, and 
teachers, — and thus, to the extent of his wrong- 



GOD'S MORAL ATTRIBUTES 157 

doing, impedes and endangers the realization of the 
final end for which he and all things exist, must be 
an object of divine disapprobation and punishment. 
Thus we get that attribute which is commonly 
spoken of as punitive justice, i. e. the divine right- 
eousness in relation to sin. Its counterpart is 
righteousness in relation to well-doing ; and both 
together mark God as just in all his dealings with 
all his creatures. 

One word concerning Love. Love is the queen 
of all God's moral attributes. It includes them 
all, and pervades them all. That striking dictum 
of St. John, which in three words expresses what 
all the wisdom of mankind had never found, " God 
is Love," is true in every sense in which it can be 
taken. There is no one attribute, such as infinity 
or eternity, from which we logically derive the con- 
ception of God as love. It can be found in no 
thought less comprehensive than the idea of the 
absolutely perfect moral being. The only defini- 
tion of which in aU its forms and manifestations 
it admits is that of self-impartation. There is in 
God an ever-active eagerness to go out of himself, 
to give of his fullness to others ; and that is love. 

In the sphere of man's physical life, divine love 
manifests itself as kindness, benevolence, paternal 
solicitude. Its higher revelations fall within the 
sphere of the spiritual life, and, since man is sin- 



158 THE BEING OF GOD 

ful and miserable, especially in tlie sphere of re- 
demption. From this it is evident that, as the 
world never knew that God is love until the com- 
ing of Christ, so this love, as a divine attribute, 
cannot be prop,erly considered apart from Christ 
and his work as the highest form of the divine 
self-impartation. Longsuffering, mercy, grace, all 
that St. Paul includes in the " unsearchable riches 
of Christ," are contained in it. 



LECTURE VII. 

THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS IN RELATION TO 
THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY. 

When in the first part of the creed, God is des- 
ignated as the Father, the relation thereby intended 
is that which he sustains to the Son, named in the 
second part. This is evident from the description 
of the Son as the " only -hegotten Son," by which 
every other species of sonship than that which 
belongs to Jesus Christ our Lord is excluded. 
Moreover, the third part of the creed, occupied 
with the Holy Ghost and the sphere of his activity, 
clearly implies that the several terms Father, Son, 
and Holy Ghost are used in their mutually corre- 
lated sense. The sum of Christian belief is here 
grouped about the three names of the baptismal 
formula, which must be understood as there used. 
Our next topic, therefore, must be the doctrine of 
the Trinity. 

Now it would be comparatively easy for me to 
give an exposition of the doctrine, and the argu- 
ments usually advanced in support of it. But if 
I am not very much mistaken, that is not all you 



160 THE BEING OF GOD 

need or would wish. You do not wisli me to take 
this grandest problem that can be presented to 
human thought, and work it out before you accord- 
ing to the methods of ordinary theological text- 
books, ^-ithout first pointing out, to the best of 
my ability, the postulates that lie at the base of 
the demonstration, if I may so call it. You do not 
merely want to know what the church believes, 
but how to vitalize that belief as a personal convic- 
tion. You wish to know how the church itself 
came to believe it, and that in the face of deter- 
mined, prolonged, and frequently renewed opposi- 
tion^ from within and without. A belief so tri- 
umphantly battle-strong must have had a basis of 
absolute certainty. AVhat was that basis ? 

It cannot have been furnished by the reason, 
through any apriori methods of demonstrating the 
Trinity. It is undoubtedly true that the philoso- 
phical effort to construct the doctrine of God de- 
rives welcome aid and relief from the Christian 
doctrine of the Trinity. But it is one thing to per- 
ceive the rationality of a doctrine once formulated, 
and a very different thing to discover and estab- 
lish it. Besides, it must not be forgotten that the 
belief of the church, so far as it is the belief of 
the whole church, is the belief, not of her great 
minds and trained intellects alone, but also of the 
simple, uneducated, and ignorant. And in these 



GEOUND OF PEBSONAL FAITH 161 

true belief, personal conviction, can never rest on 
the mere assurance of the others that such a thing 
is true. He who professes faith in the Triune 
God for no other reason than that the catechism 
has taught him, and that his teachers once a year 
at least renew the assurance, that God is Triune, 
does not really believe it. It simply lies in him as 
a sort of deposit, which he may indeed faithfully 
preserve even at the price of his life, while yet it 
is never a living, active force within him. It stirs 
neither his thoughts nor his emotions. It is a 
treasure of the value of which he has no concep- 
tion. It is an item of the faith he must profess in 
order to be saved, or, what in these days is per- 
haps as likely to be his feeling, in order to be a 
" good Churchman." But if the doctrine had had 
no other confessors, it and the church that teaches 
it would have perished long since. 

The doctrine of the Trinity is essentially a di- 
vinely revealed doctrine. And now some are per- 
haps ready to conclude that the basis for personal 
conviction of which we are in search must be found 
in the Scriptures. To that also I must say. No. 
Do not charge me with disloyaltj^ to the Book di- 
vine before I have placed my whole thought before 
you. I say. No. He who professes faith in the 
Trinity, for no other reason than that he finds 
it taught in Scripture, does not really believe it. 



162 THE BEING OF GOD 

It is in him as much a dead deposit as though he 
derived it from the catechism or his teacher. And 
in proof of that position I cite the facility with 
which a large proportion of a nominally Trinita- 
rian population, here in New England, abandoned 
the doctrine and became Unitarians at the close of 
the last and the beginning of the present century. 
As soon as a breeze of new doctrine sprang up, 
it blew away the Trinitarian belief, even while it 
left the infallibility of the Scriptures unimpugned. 
People merely said. We have misunderstood the 
Scriptures. 

Besides, when I say that the doctrine of the 
Trinity is a revealed doctrine, I do not mean that 
it is revealed by the Scriptures. Revelation pre- 
cedes Scripture. God did not reveal the truth by 
moving holy men to write it with pen and ink on 
paper ; he first revealed it in historical facts, and 
then holy men were moved to write the facts from 
which the doctrine springs. The doctrine itself, 
in the form in which the church holds it, is not to 
be found in the Scriptures. It took four centuries 
to formulate it. Not even the Council of Nicsea, 
but that of Constantinople, held in a. d. 381, gave 
it the form in which we recite it. God in history 
made the revelation ; God in Scripture, through 
evangelists and apostles, recorded the great facts ; 
and God in the church, through the divinely illu- 



TRE TRINITY -ROW REVEALED 163 

ruinated intellects of the Christian fathers, inter- 
preted the facts, placed the principles contained in 
them into correlation with the divine nature or be- 
ing, and expressed the result in terms of intellec- 
tual conceptions. If, therefore, the basis of per- 
sonal conviction is to be found in testimony, it 
must be sought, not only in the Scriptures of the 
first century, but also in the writings of the second, 
third, and fourth centuries. And if inspiration 
of testifiers can turn their testimony into immedi- 
ate living certainty for him who hears it, without 
other aid, that quality belongs to the fathers of the 
church, technically so called, as well as to apostles 
and evangelists ; for both belong to the one church 
of the living God, which is the '^ house of God," 
" the pillar and ground of the truth," because in 
it the God of truth by his Spirit dwells and works. 
Do not think that in this I am enunciating any- 
thisg like the Roman Catholic or Cyprianic con- 
ceptions of the church ; far from it. I am only 
expressing my belief in the immanence of God in 
his church. However, on this I cannot dwell just 
now. The conclusion at which I aim is simply 
this : If inspiration is to be the last basis of per- 
sonal Christian conviction, we must for the doc- 
trine of the Trinity rely on the fathers who com- 
pleted it as well as on the apostles who began 
it ; but that inspiration, the inspiration of another, 



164 THE BEING OF GOD 

cannot in and of itself produce the certainty of a 
full and reasonable conviction in any human mind. 
If it can, how do you account for the fact that the 
most moving pictures of divine love, and the most 
terrifying exhibitions of sin and its results, may 
be presented to a congregation of self-confessed 
sinners, with all the authority of Holy Writ, and 
yet leave the greater part cold and unmoved ? 

How great the distance is between truth enter- 
tained by the mind on the guaranty of external 
authority, and truth held on the certainty produced 
by immediate personal conviction, has been felt all 
through the history of the church. In Clement 
of Alexandria it manifests itself in the division of 
Christians into believers and gnostics, the knowers. 
Augustine, strongly as he insists on unquestioning 
submission to the di^^.ne authority of revelation in 
the Scriptures and in the church, nevertheless ac- 
knowledges the unsatisfactory character of beliefs 
thus grounded, by saying : " Faith \_i. e. belief on 
authority, a very different thing from the " faith " of 
the New Testament] precedes knowledge : believe 
in order that you may understand." Another say- 
ing of Augustine's is : '^ Faith seeks — the intellect 
finds." Evidently faith in the sense of belief on 
authority is, according to Augustine, defective in 
the certainty of knowledge, yet leads to it. But 
how it leads to it, what th^e is to bridge the 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 165 

chasm between these, he fails to indicate. This 
omission, however, is supplied by a striking apho- 
rism of Anselm, in his book " On the Trinity 
against the Blasphemies of Roscelin," although 
he made no practical use of it in his discussions. 
The aphorism is this : " If you do not believe, you 
cannot experience ; if you do not experience, you 
cannot understand." Experience, then, is the basis 
of personal conviction ! That is to say, the father 
of mediaeval scholasticism anticipates the doctrine 
of modern theology that the Christian faith has 
its living basis in the Christian consciousness. 
The words differ, — consciousness and experience, 
— the thing is identical. That which makes us 
certain of the doctrine of the Trinity, and of all 
other doctrines peculiar to Christianity, is, in the 
last analysis, not rational demonstration, nor reli- 
ance on the infallibility of the Scriptures or of the 
church, but on that immediate consciousness which 
results from personal experience. 

The vital importance of this conclusion, and the 
fact that it is still far from universal recognition 
in the theology of this country, make a fuller ex- 
position of it necessary. It is not anything new. 
Luther and the old Protestant dogmatic theolo- 
gians found a similar principle in the words of St. 
Paul : " The Spirit himself beareth witness with 
our spirit that we are the sons of God." ^ But the 

^ Cf . Hagenbaeh, Hist, of Doctrines, ii. 245, n. 6. 



166 THE BEING GF GOB 

later theology, and not least the American theol- 
ogy, departed from this principle, — probably be- 
cause it feared to detract from the supremacy of 
Scripture, with which it has nothing to do, — and 
constructed its whole system of certitude in reli- 
gious matters on what are essentially deistical lines. 
We believe, it said, because God has spoken in the 
Bible ; and we believe that God has spoken in the 
Bible, because we can j^rove it by long and intri- 
cate courses of reasoning. But what under this 
plan becomes of the untutored multitude, upon 
whom all this reasoning, be it never so con^dncing 
to him who can follow it, is lost ? Can they never 
attain to the rest and peace of certainty? Must 
they forever be a sort of plebeian caste in the com- 
monwealth of religion ? If the Scriptures had not 
a tenfold stronger support in the consciousness of 
the Christian people than they have in the books 
of theologians on the " Evidences of Chi'istianity," 
their practical power would be small indeed. 

But let us proceed to study this Christian con- 
sciousness more directly. How does it arise ? 
What brings it into action ? If it be conscious- 
ness, what is it conscious of ? With regard to the 
term " consciousness," it is not in all respects per- 
fectly adequate to the use made of it. We ordi- 
narily employ it to denote knowledge of our own 
mental acts, conditions, and feelings, — self -con- 



THE BELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS 167 

sciousness, i. e. consciousness of what is or occurs 
in the self. But this does not cover all we mean by 
it in the phrase " Christian consciousness." There 
we use the term also in its widest etymological 
sense of knowledge shared with another or others. 
Being thus warned of the elasticity of the word, 
we shall find no serious difficulty in the use of it. 
The Christian, or rather the religious consciousness, 

— for what I am now to speak of is characteristic 
of man as a religious being, — is, first of all, 
communion, consisting in mutual knowing, — con- 
sciousness, — between the human personality and 
the divine. God manifests (reveals) himself, and 
man apprehends the revelation, i. e. apprehends 
God as being, and as being such as he manifests 
himself, e. g. the omnipotent, the omnipresent, the 
omniscient, the moral. Man becomes cognizant on 
the one hand of God as knowing, and knowing him, 

— man ; and on the other, of himself as knowing 
God so far forth as he manifests himself. In this 
earliest form, the religious consciousness belongs to 
what is usually called the stage of natural religion. 
It marks man as a God-conscious being. It gives 
rise to various perceptions and feelings, — predomi- 
nantly to the perception of God's infinite greatness 
and to the sense of fear. For, knowing himself a 
sinner against eternal moral truth, and God as spot- 
less purity and guardian of moral right, he is con- 



168 THE BEING OF GOD 

scious of ill-desert, and knows that God must judge 
him as he judges himself. Hence the feeling not 
merely of awful reverence, — ■ such as even innocence 
must experience in the presence of so great a God, 
and which is essentially elevating and quickening, 
— but of prostrating fear and apprehension, the 
vain impulse to flee from the omnipresent and to 
hide from the omniscient. This is by no means the 
only content of the sinful, natural, religious con- 
sciousness, but its most marked feature in practical 
experience. And it is manifest that it must inter- 
pose a barrier to free intercommunion between 
God and man. Man has lost the absolutely fear- 
less, glad, self-yielding trustfulness, the wholly 
blissful sense of dependence on God, which consti- 
tute the ideal relation between him and God. He 
wanders like an outcast from his fathers house 
and home, unhappy, full of distrust, and, what is 
worse than all, with his perverted selfhood assert- 
ing itself in obstinacy and rebellion. A broken 
human friendship may help to illustrate the sit- 
uation. What breach is more irreparable and in- 
surmountable than that which is opened by a dis- 
rupted, more than brotherly unity ? "A brother 
offended is harder to be won than a strong city, 
and their contentions are like the bars of a castle." 
The perfection of the mutual adaptation and previ- 
ous oneness becomes the strongest difficulty in the 



NEED OF A REMEDIAL REVELATION 169 

way of reconciliation. Similar to this is the rela- 
tion of sinful man to God ; only, the disruption 
and the difficulties in the way of its removal are 
all of his own making, and derive their evil power 
from him alone. 

This brief statement of the religious conscious- 
ness and its contents contains three points : — 

First. That there is in man a natural capacity 
for communion with God. It is to this that God 
addresses himself in all his revelations, of whatso- 
ever form. It includes, of course, man's ability to 
recognize the revelation as divine by immediate 
intuition, and to respond to it. 

Secondly. That since man is a sinner, the divine 
revelation must assume a predominantly remedial, 
reconciling, restoring character. God must, in 
some way, reconcile the world unto himself. There 
must be a disclosure of divine qualities not dis- 
closed in nature, — qualities of which sinless be- 
ings might have remained forever ignorant, such 
as compassion, mercy, unchanging, self-sacrificing 
love, all of them eternally present in God, yet 
truly knowable to finite beings only through their 
active exhibition. And yet, as the knowledge of 
them, and the reproduction of them by finite crea- 
tures in themselves, was necessary to their realiz- 
ing the divine ideal of perfect finite moral beings, 
we have here incidentally come across what may 



170 THE BEING OF GOD 

he regarded as the reason why God permitted sin 
to come into existence. 

Finally. While sin brought with it the neces- 
sity for a reconciling revelation, the results of sin, 
the alienation of man from God, and the interposi- 
tion by him of obstacles in the way of that im- 
mediate heart to heart and mind to mind commu- 
nion with God, of which by nature he is capable, 
made it necessary that this reconciling revelation 
should open for itself a new way to the mind and 
heart of man ; that God should break through 
time and space, present himself to man in human 
form, under all the limitations of the finite nature, 
but with all the unimpaired fullness of divine life 
and love, as the compassionate, the merciful, the 
Father, Friend, and Saviour. That must come to 
pass which St. Paul says did come to pass, " God 
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." 
In other words, revelation, considered only as re- 
medial, must be historical. It could not be mere 
instruction through the medium of language. Lan- 
guage could convey to him little beyond what he 
already found given in creation and his own na- 
ture. It could never give him anything like ade- 
quate conceptions of divine compassion and love. 
Even the imperfect ideas entertained of these by 
Old Testament writers came through the partial 
exhibitions of them in the Old Testament history. 



HISTORICAL REVELATION DEFINED 171 

And most assuredly no mere instructing revelation 
could infuse new spiritual life and power into tlie 
shattered soul. That can only be effected by a 
real impartation of creative power. Hence the 
effect of the Christian revelation is recognized and 
spoken of as a new creation, and the restored soul 
as a " new creature." There has been, and there 
is constantly going on, an outflow of divine life 
every whit as real and literally true as that of 
which man's first creation was the result. The 
historical character of the Christian revelation is 
manifest from the New Testament itself. Half of 
the book is simply historical narrative, and the 
other half is so full of the facts related in the first 
that it would be meaningless without them. 

The question now is. How is the religious con- 
sciousness affected by the historical self-revelation 
of God of which Christ is the centre ? How does 
it reach the individual, — how does it touch, not 
merely his outward senses, but his inner self? 
How does it transform him, — make a new creature 
of him ? 

The first step evidently is that he be informed of 
the facts of the revelation, so far as they took place 
once for all. This suggests a closer definition of 
what constitutes an historical revelation. It is a 
revelation the essential element in which is that 
God manifests himself in acts ; that he does not 



172 THE BEING OF GOD 

merely communicate thoughts to man, but works 
among men, on men, and in men. Part of these 
acts, the historical in the narrower, more usual 
sense of the term, took place once for all, such as 
the birth of the Incarnate Logos, the works of be- 
neficence he wrought, the discourses he delivered, 
his passion, death, resurrection, ascension, — all 
that belongs to the Saviour's earthly work and 
life. These may be classed as externally historical 
and general. The other part, the internally histor- 
ical and individual part as it may be called, is of 
perpetual recurrence. It consists of acts wrought 
by the Divine Spirit directly on the human spirit. 
What they are will come out in the sequel. Ke- 
turning now to the question proposed, I say that 
the first step in bringing the revealing God and 
the religious consciousness of the sinner into con- 
tact is to inform the latter of the facts of the ex- 
ternally historical revelation. Here the Scriptures 
find their proper place. They not only contain a 
record of the facts, but they interpret them, and 
place them in their relations to each other and to 
God's eternal purpose. And yet, with all their di- 
vine excellences, they cannot teU their story to the 
best advantage and with the most effective power, 
without the living voice and heart of one who him- 
self has experienced the power of the divine acts, 
— in whom Christ's words and works again take 



METHOD OF PERSONAL REVELATION 173 

on flesh and blood. St. Paul tells how the facts 
must be presented when, writing to the Galatians, 
he says that Christ had been depicted before their 
very eyes as the Crucified. Thus vividly let the 
whole history of God's acts in Christ, and of the 
words of him who spoke as never man spake, be 
reproduced, not as to external form only, but as to 
their innermost life and spirit, and what will be 
the effect on the hearer ? That will depend on his 
spiritual condition. If he has not yet felt the mis- 
ery of his estate, if he is still busy wasting his Fa- 
ther's goods in riotous living, has not yet been re- 
duced to the swine's food, is not yet aware of the 
utter spiritual bankruptcy that is upon him, he 
will be left as he was found. The preparatory dis- 
pensation of law, captivity, and suffering, for him 
is not yet ended. The fullness of time, in which 
the Incarnate Word can appear, is for him not yet 
come. But on the poor in spirit, on him who is 
aware of all his inward emptiness, whose prideful 
self-assertion has broken down under the galling 
consciousness of captivity to the powers of sin and 
death, who feels the horror of having lifted his 
hand against the final ends of Infinite Truth and 
Goodness, who would gladly be the least of all 
God's creatures if he might but feel himself in free 
and peaceful accord with all that is true and good, 
— what will be the effect on him ? Is it not al- 
ways that expressed by the well-known hymn ? — 



174 THE BEING OF GOD 

' ' Thy love uiikiiown 
Has broken every barrier down ; 
Now to be thine, yea, thine alone, 
Lamb of God, I come ! ' ' 

The new disclosures of tlie Father's qualities in 
and through the Son, the pity that knows no lim- 
its, the leve that did not hesitate to send the Son 
in search of the lost, to divest itself in that Son of 
the awful form of Deity, ay, to descend to death 
and the grave, — this love, brought home to the 
religious consciousness, draws from it the joyous 
response, I come, and thereby opens once more the 
long-closed avenues of immediate communion be- 
tween the Father and the sinful but repentant 
spirit. That cry, " I come," is the birth-cry of 
faith, the first expression of restored trust and 
confidence. 

Thus the external general revelation has pro- 
duced its effect. It has restored communion be- 
tween the Infinite and the finite ; and let us also 
note that it has begun the change of the religious 
consciousness common to all men into the specific 
form of the Christian consciousness. But the his- 
torical revelation is not yet complete. There now 
follow that class of divine manifestations which I 
have named the internal individual revelation, — 
the operations of grace, as the theologians often 
say. As they enter into the life of the individual, 



METHOD OF PEBSONAL REVELATION 175 

they are necessarily repeated for eacli individual. 
It is not easy to enumerate or describe them. We 
can know them only through their effects. For 
the same reason, it is not possible to know whether 
they be, so to speak, separate visitations of divine 
power, or should rather be conceived as results of 
the abiding presence of the Divine Spirit in and 
with the human spirit. The latter seems to be the 
Scriptural view, and agrees best with the divine 
omnipresence. To speak in the language of St. 
Paul, when the penitent turns to Him in faith, 
God sends into his soul the Spirit of his Son, 
whereby he cries Abba Father. That act of power 
is the divine answer to the sinner's faith. Its re- 
sult is the consciousness of forgiveness and restora- 
tion to divine favor which by sin was felt to be lost 
and forfeited. The indwelling Spirit replaces the 
old fear of God by active love for God, and joins, 
according to the apostle's representation, with the 
soul itself in affirming its sonship to God (Rom. v. 
5 ; viii. 16). And that this sonship may be real, 
and not merely titular, the creative touch of the 
Almighty renovates the decayed powers of the 
spiritual nature, restores the right balance between 
the spiritual and physical, the reason and the ap- 
petites, and reinstates the higher in authority over 
the lower. Hence St. Paul says, " We are God's 
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good 



176 THE BEING OF GOD 

works." The fruits of the Spirit, he says again, 
are love, joy, peace, — general Christian habits of 
mind, as Lightfoot explains ; longsuffering, kind- 
ness, beneficence, — virtues that come out in social 
life ; faithfulness, meekness, temperance, — princi- 
ples of all-sided application to conduct. 

Now it cannot be questioned that all these re- 
sults are such as must affect the consciousness of 
the subject. They are matters of experience, and 
therefore verifiable. They cannot be figments of 
the imagination, born of apostolic enthusiasm, and 
reproduced now and then in mystically inclined in- 
dividuals. If that were the case, all faith in their 
reality must have perished centuries ere now. Nor 
are they of such a nature that the individual sub- 
ject of them can easily mistake them. Pie has the 
same criterion by which to judge of their reality 
which the man in the gospel applied who said : 
" One thing I know, — that whereas I was blind, I 
now see." The Christian can bring his experiences 
to a similar test. And when he does, can there be 
doubt what its effect will be on his certainty con- 
cerning the doctrines involved in them? When 
he reflects that God, whom he once dreaded as 
the infinitely righteous, has now become to his 
thought the God of infinite compassion and bound- 
less love, — a conception never reached by man ; 
that he himself, once a wretched wanderer, with- 



THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS 111 

out God and without hope in the world, has been 
lifted into the glorious liberty of the children of 
God, — can he doubt that the Christ whose works 
and words produced this change, and gave him, the 
captive of sin and death, the power to become a 
son of God, is indeed the eternal Son, the express 
image of the Father, who in him was reconciling 
the world to himself ? When he contrasts his 
former moral impotence, the feebleness of his will 
to resist temptation, which forced him to exclaim, 
" Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me 
from the body of this death ! " with the new spirit- 
ual energies that now pervade his being, so that he 
spends his days in joyous service to God and God's 
creatures, and feels " I can do all things through 
Christ who strengtheneth me," can he hesitate to 
accept the apostolic teaching concerning the new 
creation by the Holy Spirit ? Manifestly, the 
Christian consciousness is not certain of its own 
experiences only, but also of the facts by which 
those experiences are produced, and consequently 
of the doctrines which state those facts. 

True, it is possible to conceive of the facts as 
truly apprehended and truly described in single dis- 
jointed propositions, and yet entertain misgivings 
as to the validity and certainty of the combina- 
tion of these elements in larger dogmatic state- 
ments. The facts that show the divine power of 



178 THE BEING OF GOD 

Christ may be incontestable, and the deduction 
made from them that Christ is God Incarnate may 
also be true. So the results produced by the Holy 
Ghost may be rightly held to infer the Deity of 
the Holy Ghost ; but can we also repose confidently 
on the further inference that he is a personal 
agent? And if we can, what reason have we to 
rely upon the further reasoning that Father, Son, 
and Holy Ghost are so related in one Triunity as 
the church teaches ? Does not the attesting function 
of the Christian consciousness cease to have any 
value here? Well, suppose it did? No one, I 
believe, is in perishing need of absolute certainty 
on all points of dogma. With the great practical 
verities of the Christian faith secure, uncertainty as 
to our modes of combining them in intellectual ap- 
prehensions is of no great practical moment. But 
the extent of this uncertainty is by no means so 
unlimited as we sometimes think. When you com- 
pare dogmatic system with dogmatic system, — tak- 
ing, of course, the systems, not of isolated or eccen- 
tric individuals, but of persons who, like Dr. Hodge, 
for instance, stand forth as classic representatives 
of the theological consciousness of large communi- 
ties of Christians, — you find great variety in form 
and method, and no little divergence on points of 
remoter bearing, but, after all, substantial unity in 
the apprehension of the grand outlines of Christian 



THE COMMON CONSCIOUSNESS 179 

truth. And here, too, the Christian consciousness 
comes into play. It has one phase which I liave 
not yet brought out. It is, as already observed, fel- 
lowship in knowledge, — fellowship, first with God, 
but secondly with men of like Christian spirit. 
The Christian community realizes the promise of 
the Redeemer to send the Spirit of Truth to guide 
his people into truth. That condition is brought 
about in the living church of the living God to 
which the prophet looked forward when he prom- 
ised Jerusalem, — then in the dust of humiliation, 
— "All thy children shall be taught of God." 
The church, — and, mind you, I use this term in no 
narrow, artificially restricted sense, — the church is 
not a human society, held together by a constitu- 
tion and by-laws ; it is, so far as it really exists, 
the sphere in which the Holy Ghost dwells and 
works. Under his efficacious power, thinking as 
well as living — I should say thinking as a promi- 
nent element in living — is guided no less than the 
will and the affections. How could it be otherwise ? 
If the new creation of the soul by divine power be 
real, how can it fail to reach the mind as well as 
the spirit ? Not to add to the natural endowment, 
but to aid and develop it. It sets it free from the 
disturbing influence of sin, which previously con- 
fused and darkened it, and made it uncongenial 
with spiritual truth, — and with that alone are we 



180 THE BEING OF GOD 

here concerned. St. Paul, whose profound personal 
experience, if nothing else, gives authority to his 
words, declares that " the natural man receiveth 
not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are 
foolishness unto him," — yes, foolishness, just as 
music is foolishness to the man who has no ear ; 
" neither can he know them, because they are spir- 
itually discerned." The Saviour expresses the 
same truth when he says, " If any man be willing 
to do the will of God, he shall know of the doc- 
trine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak 
of myself." Turn the natural man into the spirit- 
ual, make him willing to do the will of God, — the 
very work accomplished in the renewal by the Holy 
Ghost, — and you open all his latent powers of 
spiritual insight and intuition. His natural abili- 
ties are quickened, he is made confident and eager, 
yet reverent and docile, because his judgment is 
sobered. Place such a person in society with like- 
minded fellows, and there arises an externally inde- 
terminable, perhaps, but none the less real, organic 
body, of which the Holy Ghost is the all-animating 
soul, who uses each member according to his con- 
nate aptitudes for service to the whole. There are 
diversities of operations : to one is given the word 
of wisdom, — the power of unfolding and enforcing 
truth for immediately practical uses ; to another, 
the word of knowledge, — the deeper speculative 



THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 181 

apprehension of truth in its manifold relations ; 
but it is the Spirit of God that worketh all in all. 
This doctrine, so characteristic of St, Paul's whole 
conception of Christianity, and so far-reaching in 
its results, is but the unavoidable corollary of the 
fundamental experience that through faith man is 
not only justified, but new-created, brought back to 
his normal self and to his normal relations of inter- 
communion with God and his fellow-men. Do we, 
then, make the church infallible? By no means. 
Infallibility would imply the destruction by the 
Spirit of the freedom and personality of the indi- 
vidual or congregation in whom he dwells. The 
Holy Ghost is not a despotic ruler, but a gentle, 
patient teacher. But he is ever-present ; and as 
surely as the Church of God has never ceased to be, 
so surely does he exercise in it his teaching, guid- 
ing function. 

The bearing of this conception of the church as 
a God-taught body, on the results of its dogma- 
building function, is obvious. It does not make 
creeds, and articles of faith, or systems of theology 
infallible, but it does insure, beyond peradventure, 
that nothing can become part and parcel of the 
church's living, permanent conviction that has not 
its roots deep down in the experience of the Chris- 
tian soul. Teachers may err, one here, another 
there ; but the free interchange of thought, carried 



182 THE BEING OF GOD 

on in the spirit of Christ, eliminates the error and 
makes the truth more evident and clear. And on 
the other hand, nothing that is so rooted in the 
Christian consciousness can be permanently sur- 
rendered or misapprehended. It may for a time 
drop out of sight, yea, be discarded as ancient 
error. For the church, like the waiting virgins of 
the parable, may fall asleep. The divine life is 
in human vessels. Sleep may even be necessary 
under these finite conditions. But the Divine 
Spirit neither sleeps nor slumbers. He but awaits 
the favorable conjunction, the time and season ap- 
pointed of the Father, to invigorate the old con- 
sciousness and restore the old truth to its rightful 
place and efficacy. 

It has doubtless occurred to some of you, as an 
objection to what has been advanced, that the 
Christian experience of most of us, who have been 
brought up in the Christian community, lacks the 
vividness, the overwhelming intensity, which char- 
acterized that of the early church. That is true. 
The age of the apostles and Christian fathers was 
one of mighty, creative energy. It produced in the 
individual and in society changes of revolutionary 
violence. It called forth embittered intellectual 
combats and physical persecutions, that raised the 
Christian consciousness to the highest pitch of self- 
assertion. It was that that conquered the wisdom 



TYPES OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 183 

of the heathen world and overthrew its gods, and 
illumined the martyr's face with a sheen of glory- 
brighter than the flames that enwrapped his body. 
The experience of most Christians of later days is 
undoubtedly of a different type. 

But though of a different type, it is not less real. 
Most of us can probably make less direct applica- 
tion of the contrast between the prodigal herding 
swine and the prodigal reinstated in his father's 
home. If we have a consciousness of an irreligious 
part of life, — and who has not ? for the part or 
parts need not to cover years of time, — it brings 
back to us the sense of weariness, emptiness, dis- 
harmony, such as underlies the query seriously 
asked by some, Whether life be worth living. It 
is the consciousness of an essentially negative, dead 
state of the soul. Compare with that the con- 
sciousness of your best days or hours, which is one 
of spiritual life and vigor, of ready response to the 
good and true, of comfort in disappointment and 
cheerful patience in affliction or adversity, and you 
will find that you too have an immovable basis of 
certainty within yourself. Indeed, in more than 
one respect your experience is far preferable to 
one of the more obtrusive type, which is more lia- 
ble to prove delusive and transient. 

Besides, the Christian, like any other communal 
consciousness, comes to its fullest and clearest de- 



184 THE BEIXG OF GOD 

velopment only in the few. Nations, schools of 
thought, professions even, and trade-guilds, have 
peculiar forms of eonscionsness, gTowing out of 
peculiar experiences. And all likewise have their 
leaders and prophets, — individuals who most 
clearly feel and apprehend the life of the particu- 
lar body, and all that that life includes. The na- 
tion finds them in its patriotic heroes, statesmen, 
and orators : the school, in its founders, teachers, 
and authors : the prof ession or trade-guild, in those 
who best express by precept and example what all 
feel to be the ideal of their pursuit. So in the 
Christian commonwealth there are those in whom 
the life of the whole manifests itself with extraor- 
dinary intensity and perfection. In them the 
power of sin and guilt, the renovating effects of 
Christ's redemption, the animating indwelling of 
the Spirit, are attended by experiences equal in 
force and definiteness to any impressions made on 
the consciousness through the outer senses. It is 
these who, in their several degrees and according 
to their other endowments, in official stations or as 
private members, as pastors, preachers, teachers, 
hymn - writers, singers, devout worshipers, busy 
workers, cheerful sufferers, — whatsoever, whereso- 
ever they be, — become to others the interpreters 
of those phenomena of inner sjDirit-life which their 
own consciousness presents in obscurer forms. 



DOGMATIC THEOLOGY 185 

Thus aided by the life and spirit of the whole 
body, they, too, are able to know of the doctrine 
that it is of God. 

But, it may be asked, must we then conclude 
that all those who dissent from the doctrine of the 
Trinity, as accepted by Christendom at large, are 
without the pale of the Christian family? Or, to 
change from the abstract to the concrete, must we 
hold that no Arian or Socinian can have the wit- 
ness of the Spirit that he is a child of God ? — that, 
as the so-called Athanasian symbol says, not firmly 
believing the Catholic faith, he cannot be saved ? 
Far from it ! That creed itself shows how easily 
the speculative faculty, divorcing itself from the 
Christian consciousness, may either go beyond or 
contravene its testimony. That is precisely what 
happened in New England Unitarianism. It ig- 
nored the Christian consciousness of the ages, and 
trusted to the speculative reason to reconstruct the 
Christian doctrine. But an error of the head does 
not necessarily imply an unrenovated soul. The 
old theology is full of speculative errors. The 
worst of all, perhaps, is that confusion of saving 
faith with the acceptance of a dogmatic system, 
which goes back almost to the age of the apostles, 
and inspires the damnatory utterances of the Atha- 
nasian creed. But faith, true faith, the trustful re- 
sponse of the human soul to the self -revealing love 



186 THE BEIXG OF GOD 

of God, lived not^vitlistandiiig the error. Specula- 
tive theology has its uses, great and valuable : but 
system may follow system, in a process of endless 
upbuilding and down-tearing, without serious dam- 
age to anybody. It is but the intellectually reared 
superstructure : the facts and doctrines attested by 
the Christian consciousness furnish the divine foun- 
dations. The superstructure may fall every hun- 
dred years ; the foundations are eternal.^ 

I have utterly failed of my aim in this lecture 
if I have not helped some of you to a clearer ap- 
prehension of what is or is not involved in the ac- 
ceptance or rejection of any theories concerning 
the inspiration and absolute infallibility of the 
Scriptures. There is probably nothing that in- 
volves many a young student of theology in such 
serious mental difficulty, not to say distress, as the 
finding that the critical study of the Bible un- 
settles the notions concerning the sacred volume 
which he previously held. It takes him a good 
while to find himself in those that are offered in 
their place. It seems Kke the subversion of his 
dearest treasure, — like the extinguishment of the 

1 I am glad to call attention to a book pntHshed since this lec- 
ture -was written, — Tli€ Evidence of Christian Experience. Ely 
Lectures for 1S90, by Professor Steams, of the Bangor Tbeolo- 
g^ieal Seminary. 



AUTHOEITY OF SCEIPTUBES. 187 

one light that promised to guide his feet in safety 
through the labyrinth of error and darkness. But 
there lies his mistake. What is taken away and 
what is offered in its place are both theories, — 
mere theories. It is impossible to construct an ab- 
solutely certain theory on the subject ; it may be 
impossible to construct one that shall be even neg- 
atively unobjectionable, or one that will explain all 
the phenomena to be explained. But no truth is 
thereby endangered. Was there ever a surer, 
more boldly triumphant faith than Luther's ? Yet 
we all know with what freedom he read the sacred 
books. Christianity is not such a tender, exotic 
plant that its life depends on any theories of ours. 
It is not such a mechanically built-up structure of 
ideas and conceptions that it must needs rest on 
the foundations of an infallible book. It is the 
life of God in humanity, through its union with 
the Son. Not the book bears it, but it bears the 
book. And yet the book is of enduring normative 
authority. It gives the facts of the revelation of 
God in the Son, together with an authentic though 
incomplete interpretation of those facts by the 
Christian consciousness of the creative period. 
The facts no one can alter ; and every phase and 
content of the Christian consciousness of later days 
must legitimatize itself by its harmony with, and 
direct lineal descent from, that of the apostolic age. 



LECTUKE YIII. 

THE TEINITY: its historical REVELATION. 

The statement of tlie doctrine of the Trinity, 
with which we are all most familiar, is that im- 
plied in the opening petitions of the Litany. We 
address successively God the Father, God the Son, 
and God the Holy Ghost, as of equal power and 
mercy, and then call upon " the Holy, blessed, and 
glorious Trinity, three Persons and one God." 
The first of the Thirty-nine Articles is of the same 
tenor : beginning with the existence, attributes, and 
works of " one living and true God," it goes on to 
declare that in the " unity of this Godhead there be 
three Persons, of one substance, power, and eter- 
nity ; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." 
The older creeds, especially the Niceno-Constanti- 
nopolitan and the Athanasian, present similar state- 
ments in more expanded form, and seek to guard 
them against misapprehension and perversion, but 
neither add to their contents nor undertake to ex- 
plain them. We may therefore define the doctrine 
which is now to occupy our attention as the doc- 
trine of three persons in one God ; or, better, as 



DOCTBINE OF TEINITY-'' PEBSON '' 189 

the doctrine which teaches us to conceive of God 
as the Triune Being. A fuller definition would be 
of little service to us at present. An intelligible 
definition presupposes the fullest practicable survey 
of that which is to be defined. One stumbling- 
block, however, already verbally removed by the 
substitution of the words, " God as the Triune 
Being," for the phrase, " three Persons and one 
God," must detain us yet a moment. The word 
" person " is not to be understood in the sense of 
an individual self. That would justify the arith- 
metical objection : How can three be one ? It does 
not imply that there are three personalities, three 
different wills or egos, in the Divine Being. There 
is but one person in God, in the sense in which we 
now use the word ; but in the one divine person- 
ality there are three different modes of subsistence, 
and to these the Latin fathers applied the term 
pe7'S07ia, while the Greeks used hypostasis. It was 
impossible to find a term in either language per- 
fectly adapted to describe a relation in the Divine 
Being of which men had no experimental know- 
ledge. Whatever word was taken must be spe- 
cially defined to suit the emergency. But it may 
be doubted whether the Latins would have taken 
" person," if that word had had for them the same 
sense it has for us. It meant originally a mask, 
and then the part or character in a play repre- 



190 THE BEING OF GOD 

sented by an actor. And thougli it also came to 
mean an individual, it did not seize on tlie self- 
hood of tlie individual, so as to make that its prom- 
inent content. It was used, much as the uneducated 
use it now, very indefinitely. You look in vain in 
any lexicon of classical Latin for the word perso- 
?ialitas. Latin psychology had not reached the 
point where the word became necessary. When, 
then, we speak of three persons in the Godhead, let 
it be understood that it means something very dif- 
ferent from tri-personality. What that something 
is, we shall better be able to see hereafter. 

I shall treat of the doctrine of the Trinity under 
two heads: 1. The history of its revelation to 
and apprehension by the Christian consciousness ; 
and, 2. Its later speculative construction, i. e. the 
attempts to exhibit and justify it in terms of the 
reason. 

The history of its revelation divides again into 
three periods : 1. The preparatory period ; 2. The 
period of its positive revelation in history ; and, 3. 
The period of interpretative revelation, the results 
of which appear in the formulation of the doctrine. 

With respect to the preparatory period, it is very 
necessary to distinguish clearly between the divine 
education of the Hebrew people for the disclosure 
ultimately to be made, and pre-intimations of the 
doctrine. The proposition that the actual revela^ 



PBEPABATOBY EEVELATION 191 

tion of the Trinity was made through the Incarna- 
tion of the Logos is not more true than that not 
only Hebrew history, but all history, is one great 
process of preparation for that central event. But 
it is another question, whether the character of the 
preparation, while in progress, was sufficiently un- 
derstood to suggest to the minds of those then liv- 
ing any thoughts, however vague, of those distinc- 
tions in the being of God which the doctrine of the 
Trinity declares. There can be no doubt that the 
Hebrew prophets looked for a presence of God 
among men altogether unparalleled in earlier his- 
tory ; but were they thereby led to thoughts about 
the nature and being of God that can in any sense 
be considered anticipatory of the Christian doctrine 
of the Trinity ? That is the point now before us. 
I need not say that many Old Testament passages, 
often adduced as proof-texts, have no bearing on 
the subject whatever. When God is represented 
as saying, " Let us make men," or, " Go to, let us 
go down to confound the speech of men," the ex- 
planation is that God is conceived of as a king 
surrounded by his ministers and counselors, with 
whom he condescendingly identifies himself. The 
threefold Holy, Holy, Holy, of the seraphs' hymn, 
is only an emphatic repetition, like the cry of the 
falsely confident people of Jerusalem, " The temple 
of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of 



192 THE BEING OF GOD 

tlie Lord, is this." That the prophets did not look 
for a divine Mes^ah, in the strict sense of the word 
" divine," is now admitted by nearly all exegetes ; 
but, granting that they did, there is absolutely no- 
thing to show that it ever, even for a moment, 
suggested the inquiry, " How can the Messiah be 
God, and yet Grod be one ? " It may be true, as 
Dorner says, that if traces oi the Trinity exist in 
heathen thought, their absence in the Hebrew reli- 
gion cannot but appear surprising. Yet, assuredly, 
no such traces can be rightly found in the fact that 
Jehovah, who says, " I am that I am," also says, 
" I am he," thus, as Dorner says, placing him- 
self over against himself, and virtually asserting a 
distinction in himself which he enunciates in the 
same breath with his oneness. Nor can I see on 
what ground Dorner finds another trace in the 
words of God in Isaiah : " I blot out thy transgres- 
sions for my own sake." It is true that in these 
words God may be said to present himself as final 
end to himself as the actor who pursues that end ; 
but neither this nor the other passage presents 
forms of speech which men do not frequently use 
of themselves. 

Much has been written concerning a certain Ma- 
Vahh Yaioeh (messenger of Jehovah) who appears 
in the Old Testament. I say " a certain " MoTahli 
YaioeJi^ because it is not every MaVoMi Yaweh that 



PEEPAEATOEY EEV ELATION 193 

appears to which I refer. In most passages the 
MaVahh Yaimh is simply an angel sent by the 
Almighty to communicate his will or purposes to 
men. These angels are distinctly apprehended as 
created intelligences, wholly separate and diverse 
from God. But there is a class of passages in 
which the MaVaWi Yaweh appears as a seK-mani- 
festation of God. He appears indeed in human 
form, and speaks of God in the third person. But 
those to whom he appears are oppressed by the con- 
sciousness that they have seen God and must die. 
They see in him an impersonation of Deity such 
as is found in no other angel. He is to their minds 
not merely a messenger from God, but the revela- 
tion of the being of God. The Christian fathers 
for the most part identify him with the Logos of 
the New Testament. But there is as much reason 
to adopt the opinion of many modern writers who 
hold that he is Jehovah himself appearing in hu- 
man form, for he is explicitly addressed as Jeho- 
vah (Judges vi. 11-24). The question for us, how- 
ever, is, What was the opinion of those who heard 
or read of these appearances of MaVakh Yaweh ? 
They separate him from God and identify him 
with God in the same breath. The only satisfac- 
tory explanation is to be found in the Hebrew 
conception of God as the infinite and transcen- 
dent one, who cannot enter directly into contact 



194 THE BEING OF GOD 

with the finite. The idea underlies the whole doc- 
trine of angelic mediation. On ordinary occasions, 
he sends an angel with a message, or makes winds 
or flaming fire his ministers. But on other, rarer 
occasions, when no created messenger would suffice, 
and he would draw nigh to man in his own person, 
he veils his deity in human form, and thus appears 
to man. There is no thought here touching any 
internal distinctions within the divine being itself. 
But there is the external, relative distinction be- 
tween God as the hidden and God as the mani- 
fested. There is the conception both of the need 
of God's entering into personal relations with men, 
and of the impossibility of his doing so without 
some form of mediation. The first prerequisite 
of the doctrine of the Trinity, the fundamental 
thought without which it could never have found 
acceptance, is here, but nothing more. 

While the angel of Jehovah is found only in the 
older parts of the Old Testament Scriptures, the 
" Spirit of God," the " Holy Spirit," seems to take 
the place of angelic ministries in the age of the 
prophets. That the Spirit, although sometimes 
rhetorically personified, is nevertheless conceived 
as an impersonal power or influence exerted by 
God, is made very evident from the repeated use 
of the expression to " pour out " the Spirit. It 
is true, the same expression occurs in the New 



PEEPABATORY REVELATION 195 

Testament, but manifestly as a reminiscence of Old 
Testament phraseology. Its origin can be ex- 
plained only upon the supposition that the Spirit 
was regarded as impersonal. The same is true of 
the expressions "to baptize in the Spirit" and " to 
give to drink of the Spirit " (1 Cor. xii. 13 ; cf . 
the Septuagist on Isa. xxix. 10). 

Very striking and beautiful is the self -presenta- 
tion of the Divine Wisdom in the Book of Prov- 
erbs, chap. viii. 22 ff. : — 

The Lord produced me in the beginning of his way, 

Before his works of old. 

I was set np from everlasting, from the beginning. 

Or ever the earth was. 

When there were no depths, I was brought forth. 

When there were no fountains abounding with water, 

Before the mountains were settled. 

Before the hiUs, was I brought forth. 



When he marked out the foundations of the earth 
Then I was by him as a master-workman, 
And I was daily his delight, 
Rejoicing always before him. 

It is possible to understand these lines — and 
there are many more of like character — as no- 
thing more than literary form, intended to cele- 
brate the divine attribute of knowledge and insight. 
But in that case the personification is carried to 
an almost absurd extreme. How could a monothe- 
ist conceive of God as producing, bringing forth, 



196 THE BEING OF GOD 

an attribute without which he would lack an essen- 
tial element of Deity ? We have here apparently 
the same conception, already noted, of God as so 
separate from finite things that he can come into 
contact with them only through intermediate forms 
or beings. Hence, before creation, he brings forth 
Wisdom, who then, from the very inception of the 
work, is his assistant, — his master-workman. She 
is a species of demiurge, thrown off from God's 
own being by an act of creation. Such, at all 
events, is the form given to this doctrine in the 
apocryphal book called the Wisdom of Solomon. 
Wisdom is there represented as a " pure effluence 
from the glory of the Almighty ; " she is " a reflec- 
tion of God, the eternal light ; " the " undimmed 
mirror of his activity," an " image of his goodness " 
(chap. vii. 25 f.). She is " a breath " of the divine 
omnipotence, — "a holy Spirit," yea, " the Holy 
Spirit of God" (chap. ix. 17). She dwells before 
the throne of God. Initiated into God's own insight, 
his counselor in creation, she knows all his works. 
Having proceeded from God before the creation of 
the world, she was present when he accomplished 
it, acted then as God's organ, as now he still does 
all things through her. Hence she is the genera- 
trix of all that is, — the highest artisan in the uni- 
verse of things. She is intelligent, all-seeing, 
holy ; the source of all higher enlightenment and 



PBEFABATOEY REVELATION 197 

moral goodness in men. From generation to gen- 
eration she enters into pure souls, and makes them 
friends and prophets of God.^ That this is not 
mere rhetorical personification, but actual hypos- 
tasizing, is indubitable. Wisdom is here an ob- 
jectively real existence, produced by God, or ema- 
nating from him, intimately connected with him, 
yet distinct from him. 

The book of the Wisdom of Solomon carries 
us well down toward the time of Philo the Jew, 
and the generation immediately preceding that of 
Christ. Indeed, some have held that Philo was 
the author of the book, because in some respects 
its doctrine concernino^ wisdom and his concernins; 
the Logos are closely related. Philo's fundamen- 
tal position is that God, as the All-perfect, cannot 
come in contact with matter. It would defile him, 
yet God is the Author of all that is. Hence he 
must work through intermediate agencies, who 
shall be such as neither to defile him nor take de- 
filement from matter. These intermediate agen- 
cies are subsumed or comprehended in the Logos, 
who is the Divine Reason. They are probably con- 
ceived by Philo as emanations from God, ^. e. so 
far as he conceives them as hypostases. There 
lies the difficulty of the Philonic Logos and the 
several separate Logoi of which he is the sum. 

1 Chap -vii. 28. See Brucli, Weisheit der Hebraer, p. 340 ff. 



198 THE BEING OF GOD 

As creative agents, they must be in God and share 
his power ; and as able to come into contact with 
matter, they must be true hypostases separate from 
him. The consequence is perpetual vacillation. 
Now they are divine attributes, and now hypos- 
tases. When God fills them with his own life and 
power, they must be attributes of himself ; when 
they come to empty themselves into matter and 
the world, they must be hypostatic subsistences. 
And what is true of the several Logoi is true of 
him who is the sum total of them all, — the Logos. 
While the speculations of the Alexandrian Jews 
were thus crystallizing about the Wisdom of God 
and the Logos or Reason of God, the Palestinian 
Jews were running a somewhat parallel course 
with what they called the Memra of Jehovah, ^. e. 
the Word of God. Our knowledge of it is almost 
wholly derived from the Targums, the Chaldee par- 
aphrases of the Old Testament books, in which 
considerable of the Jewish theology of that cast is 
inwoven with the translation. According to this 
theology, the word by which God speaks and it is 
done is not a vocable, or mere sound, but becomes, 
so to speak, objectivated as it leaves the divine 
lips. The conception is built up on the basis of 
Isa. Iv. 11 : " As the rain cometh down, and the 
snow, from heaven," etc., " so shall my word be 
that goeth forth out of my mouth ; it shall not 



PREPARATORY REVELATION 199 

return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that 
which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing 
whereto I sent it." The Memra is the representa- 
tive of God when he works in history or enters 
into personal intercourse with his people. As in 
all these doctrines of mediation, it is difficult or 
rather impossible, to determine the extent of the 
hypostasizing process. The Ifemra, however, is 
believed, trusted in, prayed to, treated in all re- 
spects as a personal being. It is he who creates 
the world, who wrought in the history of the He- 
brew patriarchs, who redeemed the people out of 
Egypt, who gave the law from Sinai, and was pres- 
ent in the tabernacle. And so, through all the 
later histor}?^ of Israel. God has wholly with- 
drawn into the hiding of his eternal glory, and 
the Memra is on all occasions his representative. 

The conclusion to which this all too imperfect 
survey leads us is that in one sense there was abso- 
lutely no preparation in previous history for the 
doctrine of the Trinity. There is nowhere even a 
lisp of any eternal hypostatic distinction within 
the being of God. From the MaVakh Yaweh down 
to the Memra., every mediation is between God 
and the world, not between God and God. And 
whether it be conceived as a mere form, a conceal- 
ing garb, so to speak, put on by God himself, or 
as a distinct and objectively real hypostasis, it is 



200 THE BEING OF GOD 

always created, originated by divine power. There 
is no idea of eternal, coexistent hypostases in God 
himself. There are only forms, phases, or media 
for intercourse with finite things. In another sense, 
however, there was a preparation, and one whose 
importance it is not easy to overestimate. In the 
first place, the Hebrew people had come to the con- 
viction that God as he is in his eternal perfection 
cannot enter into direct personal relations with the 
world and mankind. It makes no difference to us 
at present to what they ascribed that impossibility, 
— whether they found it inherent in God as God, 
in the un suitableness or impurity of matter, or, 
where alone it really lies, in the moral degeneracy 
of men. They had it ; and it grew stronger and 
stronger as their conception of God became fuller 
and clearer. The more they knew of God and 
of themselves, the wider and more impassable be- 
came the gulf that separated one from the other. 
If, then, God and man were ever to become truly 
one in spirit, thought, and feeling, — and that this 
was the real goal of man's existence they were 
equally certain of, — God must of necessity come 
forth out of his eternal concealment, and manifest 
himself to man through some adequate personal 
mediator, with whom on the one hand God, on the 
other man, can enter into perfect communion. In 
that thought, you perceive, lies latent the very idea 



PEEP ABATOR Y REVELATION 201 

of the Incarnation. In the second place, the vague- 
ness that had characterized aU previous Hebrew 
conceptions of the forms or media through which 
God manifested himself became a useful means of 
transition to the reception of the doctrine of the 
Incarnation. Whether the MaVakh Yaweh of the 
earlier age was, so to speak, God himself in dis- 
guise, or whether he was a personally distinct be- 
ing, filled with divine life and qualities, and if so, 
how this could be ; how the Wisdom, the Logos, 
Memra, of later times were to be conceived in their 
essential relations to the Most High, — these were 
questions which they never pondered, certainly 
never definitely concluded. Their conceptions of 
them were in a state of permanent fluctuating 
fluidity. But this defect of thought became a pos- 
itive practical help when the Incarnation was an- 
nounced to them as an accomplished fact. When 
Jesus said, " The Father is in me, and I am in the 
Father, — I and my Father are one," he declared 
nothing at which the spiritually receptive Jew must 
take offense ; for he said nothing which for sub- 
stance Wisdom, the Logos, or Memra had not also 
said and claimed. In a word, analytical thought 
interposed no obstacle ; for the Hebrew had never 
analyzed his thought, or carried it to its last result. 

We pass now to the positive revelation itself, — - 



202 THE BEING OF GOD 

to contemplate it in tlie process o£ accomplishment. 
But how can that be done, seeing that, as an exter- 
nal event that took place once for all, it belongs to 
the past, and must withal, like creation, have been 
of such a nature as to be apparent only in its re- 
sults ? Just so, — apparent only in its results ; 
and it is in those results that we must study it. 
Not now, however, in all its results, but in those 
that followed immediately, in the age nearest the 
event. The nature of the investigation may be 
more clearly seen, perhaps, if I say that as the reve- 
lation of the Trinity is like the process of crea- 
tion in being cognizable only in its results, so it is 
like it in another respect. We have no scientific, 
authentic, written record of the process of creation. 
What was done, in what order, with what intent, 
in what way, is to be collected from the evidence, 
the dumb, unspoken testimony, of the things that 
were created. So we have no scientific record of 
the various processes of God's activity in the reve- 
lation of the Triunity of his being. We have au- 
thentic information, no doubt, concerning a few 
facts and outward events, more or less closely 
connected with the revelation, such as the birth, 
passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. But 
these may be regarded as the body, the revelation 
itself being the spirit. The revelation itself must 
be collected from the testimony of those in whom it 



THE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF JESUS 203 

was realized. Now these are, first, Christ, who was 
at ouce the personal medium of the revelation, and 
as true Man its first recipient ; and secondly, the 
earliest body of Christian believers. In a word, 
the revelation must be studied by us as it was ap- 
prehended by the seK-consciousness of Christ, and 
by the Christian consciousness of the church in the 
New Testament period, both of which find expres- 
sion in the gospels and epistles respectively. 

To make thorough work of this would require a 
book, and no small one. My time permits me 
only to devote a few sentences to it, — barely 
enough to indicate the method of the inquiry. 
And of course I must give you my exegesis of the 
passages to which I shall refer, without a word in 
defense of it. 

First, then, the self-consciousness of Jesus. It 
is most fully exhibited in the fourth gospel.^ Jesus 
knows himself as the Son of God in an altogether 
unique sense ; how unique, is seen in the fact that 
when the unreceptive Jews charge him, on account 
of it, with making himself equal with God, so far 
from denying their inference, he proceeds to un- 
fold more fully than before the divine life-giving 

1 If I were required to select two books on which exclusively 
to devolve the defense of the genuineness of St. John's Gospel, I 
should unhesitatingly choose Ezra Abbot's severely critical Au- 
thorship of the Fourth Gospel, and E. H. Sears's genial work, The 
Fourth Gospel the Heart of Christ. 



204 THE BEING OF GOD 

power involved in his Sonship (John v. 18 ff.) 
" God," he says to the Jews, " is not your Father, 
for if he were, you would love me ; for I came 
forth out of him," ^. e. derived my being from him 
(chap. viii. 42). Again : " My Father is the living 
Father, and I live on account of him," i, e. my Fa- 
ther is the source of life, and my life is both de- 
rived from him and like his (chap. vi. 57). " As 
the Father has life in himself, so he gave to the Son 
to have life in himself," i. e. the Son's derived life 
is, like the Father's, creative and inexhaustible, so 
that he can freely communicate of it to the spir- 
itually dead (chap. v. 27). Expressions such as 
these can never be understood except as indicating 
the Eedeemer's clear consciousness of that relation 
to the Father which the Nicene Creed afterwards 
sought to determine in the words, " begotten of the 
substance of the Father, God of God, Light of 
Light," Accordingly, the Saviour is conscious of 
having existed before his birth as man : " I have 
come down," he says, " from heaven." " No one 
has seen the Father, save he who is [ — came] 
from God ; he hath [ = I have] seen the Father " 
(chap. vi. 38, 46). Again : " I came out of the 
Father, and came into the world" (chap. xvi. 28). 
" And now, O Father, glorify thou me in thy pres- 
ence with the glory which I had with thee before 
the world was." " O Father, those whom thou hast 



THE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF JESUS 205 

given me, I will that where I am they also be with 
me, that they may behold my glory which thou 
hast given me, because thou didst love me before 
the founding of the world " (chap. xvii. 5, 24). 
Moreover, he knows himself one and equal with 
the Father : " He who has seen me, has seen the 
Father ; how then say est thou, Philip, Show us the 
Father? " " I and the Father are one " (chap. xiv. 
9 f. ; X. 30). " He who hates me hates also my Fa- 
ther " (chap. XV. 23). " He who honors not the Son, 
honors not the Father ; the Father has committed 
all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the 
Son as they honor the Father " (chap. v. 22, 23). 
That nevertheless he knows himself distinct from 
the Father is equally manifest : " I seek not my 
own will, but my Father's will, who sent me." 
" The Father who sent me, he has borne testimony 
concerning me " (chap. v. 30, 37). " My doctrine 
is not mine, but his who sent me " (chap. vii. 16). 
In like manner, he distinguishes betw^een himself 
and the Holy Spirit on the one hand, and the Fa- 
ther and the Spirit on the other : " I will ask the 
Father, and he will give you another Paraclete 
[Helper], to be with you forever, the Spirit of 
Truth." " The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom 
the Father will send in my name, he shall teach 
you all things, and shall bring to your minds all 
that I said to you " (chap. xiv. 16 f ., 26). Again : 



206 THE BEING OF GOD 

" When the Paraclete shall have come, whom I 
will send from the Father, the Spirit of Truth, 
who proceeds from the Father, he shall bear witness 
concerning me" (chap. xv. 26). "When he shall 
have come, the Spirit of Truth, he shall guide you 
into all the truth" (chap. xvi. 13). One or two 
citations more, to show (what, indeed, has already 
abundantly appeared) how clearly the Lord was 
conscious of his relations to the dead and d3^ing 
world, as the only but overflowing source of life 
divine : " I am the bread of life," — " the living 
bread that came down from heaven ; if any eat of 
this bread, he shall live forever " (chap. vi. 35, 51). 
"I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no 
one comes to the Father but through me " (chap, 
xiv. 6). 

We next proceed to gather a few utterances of 
the Christian consciousness of the church in the 
New Testament day. Bear in mind that they are 
not the sharply defined determinations of didactic 
theology, but the unstudied expressions of the com- 
mon Christian heart and mind, designed to influ- 
ence the life rather than to inform the intelligence. 
The only thoroughly effective way of getting at the 
thought of the apostolic church on this great sub- 
ject is to read, think, and live one's self into the 
spirit of the whole New Testament, the book to 



EABLY CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 207 

which the life of that church gave birth. The ut- 
terances I am about to adduce are only those 
whose bearing is most immediately evident. And 
as the whole life of the church is rooted in the In- 
carnation, I begin with that, " The Logos," says 
St. John, " became flesh and tabernacled among 
us." " God," says St. Paul, " sent forth his Son, 
born of a woman, born under the law " (Gal. 
iv. 4). To the Philippians (chap. ii. 6 ff.) he 
writes of Christ Jesus, who, while " being in the 
form of God, did not think the being on an equality 
with God a thing to be clung to as men cling to 
booty, but emptied himself, taking the form of a 
servant, being made in the likeness of men." The 
preexistence of the Logos, or Son of God, already 
included in these citations, is affirmed in unmistak- 
able terms : " In the beginning was the Logos, and 
through him all things were made, not one thing 
excepted." " Through him and for him all things 
have been created," says St. Paul of Christ, " and 
he is before all things " (Col. i. 17). Concerning 
his Deity, and his relations to the Father, there are 
numerous utterances : "The Logos was with God, 
and the Logos was God." The Epistle to the He- 
brews says of the Son, through whom God spake 
at the end of these days, that " he is the effulgence 
of the Father's glory, and the impress of his being " 
(chap. i. 8). St. Paul names him " the image of 



208 THE BEING OF GOD 

the invisible God," and says that " in him dwells 
all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." St. John 
says of the Incarnate Logos that "we beheld his 
glory, a glory such as marks an only-hegotten Son 
who comes from the Father ; " and again he says, 
" God no one has ever seen ; the only-begotten Son, 
who is [now again] in the bosom of the Father, he 
declared him" (chap. i. 18). 

Concerning the Holy Spirit, the utterances of 
the Christian consciousness in the New Testament 
are less clear, so far as the doctrine of the Trinity 
is concerned. He is constantly spoken of as the 
teaching, leading, indwelling Spirit. " No man 
can say that Jesus is Lord but by him," i. e. the 
Spirit must pervade the inner life, effect a recon- 
struction of it, before there can be true and loyal 
submission to Christ. This passage alone is suffi- 
ciently indicative of the importance of the Spirit's 
work. The fact that the bodies of Christians are 
temples in which the Holy Spirit dwells is urged 
as a most forcible incentive to holiness of life ; 
from which it follows that the Spirit is of divine 
purity and nature. He is spoken of as testifying 
with our spirit that we are children of God, and 
as helping our infirmity by making intercession for 
us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Chris- 
tians are warned against grieving him. But in all 
this there is little to indicate whether he is consid- 



EABLY CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 209 

ered as distinct from the Father and the Son or 
not. Of his divinity there is no doubt. He is the 
Spirit who searcheth into the deep things of God, 
even as the spirit of a man knows all there is in 
the man, — which proves him divine and eternal ; 
but is he conceived as really personal, and not 
merely rhetorically so represented ? He is named 
indifferently the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, 
the Spirit of Christ, or simply the Spirit. If either 
designation predominates, it is that of the Spirit 
of Christ. Indeed, Christ himself is once spoken 
of by St. Paul as the Spirit : " Now the Lord 
[i. e. Christ] is the Spirit " (2 Cor. iii. 17). 
True, the immediately following words — " and 
where the Spirit of the Lord [Christ] is, there is 
liberty " — imply a distinction between Christ and 
the Spirit, showing (as Meyer says) that the pre- 
ceding sentence is not meant of absolute, personal 
identity, but is spoken from a dynamic point of 
view. The one thing evident from all these names 
is, that the Spirit is divine in origin and power ; 
but whether he is regarded as a personal sub- 
sistence, and if so what is his exact relation 
to the essential being of the Father or the Son, 
does not appear. It is surprising, at first sight, 
that when the Saviour had so clearly enunciated 
the personality of the Spirit of Truth, the earliest 
Christians should show no more decided conscious- 



210 THE BEING OF GOD 

ness of tlie fact. But it may not be very difficult 
to account for it. The Holy Spirit was an Old 
Testament conception and experience. It was 
more than possible to retain old forms of speech 
and old habits of thinking about the Sj)irit, not- 
withstanding the fact that the work of the Spirit 
was carried on with wholly unprecedented life and 
vio'or. But the Licarnation of the Son of God, 
that event of surj^assing import, which made all 
things new, involved conceptions for which no old 
forms of speech and thought existed. It must be 
ex^^ressed in new phraseology. Besides, Christ 
had appeared in visible, tangible human form, 
whereby they were forced to make some efforts to 
define to their own minds his relations to God, 
or rather to think out the thought that lay in 
the words Father and Son as applied to God and 
Christ. But the Holy Spirit, although he came 
with new life, came with no new name, and ap- 
peared no otherwise than he had always done. 
Even though his personality, unknown to the Old 
Testament, were recognized, it was possible still to 
think of him habitually as divine influence or en- 
ergy, while also habitually personifying him as of 
old. That this is what actually occurred is, I think, 
a reasonable inference from all the phenomena pre- 
sented by the New Testament. The old phraseol- 
ogy obscured, if not the apprehension, certainlj^ 



EABLY CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 211 

the expression, of that part of the new revelation 
concerning the Holy Spirit which in its own nature 
presented the greatest difficulty to monotheistic 
preconceptions. 

The conclusions suggested by references to the 
Son and the Holy Spirit separately are borne out, 
I might say corroborated, by a number of passages 
in which the three divine names or agents are con- 
joined. The baptismal formula, which doubtless 
originated with the Saviour himself, cannot con- 
sistently with his other^ utterances be otherwise 
understood than as indicating three persons in 
such a sense as not to conflict with the unity of 
God. But just what that sense is, the formula it- 
self does not declare, and no word from any apos- 
tle or other New Testament writer explains. That 
is, we cannot certainly ascertain how the Trin- 
ity here implied was construed by the apostolic 
church. The same may be said of the Pauline 
benediction : " The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, 
and the love of God, and the communion of the 
Holy Ghost, be with you all." The personality of 
the Holy Ghost is here not necessarily implied. 
I pass over Ephes. ii. 18, and 1 Pet. i. 2, as 
throwing no new light on the subject. This leaves 
only 1 Cor. xii. 4-6 : ^ " Now there are diversi- 

1 The confessedly spurious words, 1 John v. 7, have been 
rightly omitted in the late reyision of the Euglish version. 



212 THE BEISG OF GOD 

ties " — or better, divisions, distributions — " of 
gifts, but the same Spirit ; and there are distribu- 
tions of ministries, but the same Lord [i. e. 
Christ] ; and there are distributions of workings, 
but the same God [z. e. the Father]." Here the 
three names appear in separate and distinct rela- 
tions to the several lines of Christian activity. The 
Holy Spirit stands first, because the whole chap- 
ter treats of gifts, charisms, which are the result 
of the indwelling Spirit operating through the 
natural powers of men. The ministries or ser- 
vices are connected with Christ, the Head and 
Euler of his body the church, to whom as Lord aU 
service is rendered. " Inasmuch as ye did it imto 
one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it 
unto me." And finally the workings, i, e. the per- 
formance of deeds of power, are connected with 
God the Father, as the source of all power, the 
cause of all causes. It is difficult to avoid the im- 
pression that we have here the conception of an 
economic Trinity, — that is, of a Trinity which 
may be such not necessarily and eternally, but 
only in manifestations, or in the apprehensions of 
men, who name God differently as he manifests 
himself in different works. 

From this rapid review it is evident that the 
fully developed church doctrine of the Trinity is 
not expressed in the Xew Testament. There is no 



SUMMABY OF BESULTS 213 

clear distinction drawn between the idea of the 
Trinity as eternally immanent in the being of God, 
and the idea of an economic Trinity as just ex- 
plained. Neither one statement nor the other is so 
expressed as at once to exclude the other. Indeed, 
there is no indication that the distinction presented 
itself at all to the consciousness of writers or 
speakers. If next we ask, Which view is the natu- 
ral logical sequence of the New Testament utter- 
ances ? I reply that to my mind there is a decided 
difference as to this between the sayings of Jesus 
and the expressions of the apostles, except those of 
the prologue to the fourth gospel. The apostles 
can be so understood as that their words imply 
only an economic Trinity. Not so the language 
of Christ and St. John. That inevitably leads to 
the idea of eternal, necessary hypostatic distinc- 
tions in the Divine Being. This difference is not 
unnatural. The self-consciousness of the Incar- 
nate Son, however affected by his humanity, might 
be expected to speak more clearly on the nature 
of Deity than the Christian consciousness of be- 
lievers. The earliest church did not rise to the 
same height of insight into this mystery as the 
God-man. And if St. John did, it must not be for- 
gotten that his gospel, where alone we find the 
expression of his higher ground, was written long 
after the epistles of St. Paul, who is really the 



214 THE BEING OF GOD 

only other New Testament source of knowledge on 
this subject. Fitted by nature for thought on so 
profound a subject, St. John had also had time for 
thought. In short, I cannot agree with those who 
think that the utterances of the whole New Testa- 
ment are consistent with the assumption of an 
economic Trinity ; nor, on the other hand, with 
those who hold the opposite opinion, and consider 
the immanent ontological Trinity to be throughout 
necessarily implied. That is true in one sense. An 
economic Trinity, that is, a manifestation of God 
in three forms of work, so as to suggest three per- 
sons, logically leads to the ontological Trinity ; for 
God cannot be conceived to manifest himself at one 
and the same time under different forms, unless 
there are in him differences of being, correspond- 
ing to these forms, and giving rise to them. For 
every act is the expression of his being, and can- 
not express it as other than it is. But the logical 
consequences of a position are not necessarily pres- 
ent to him who holds it. What I believe is, that 
most of the earliest Christians, teachers and taught, 
had no clearly defined consciousness that their con- 
ception of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost involved 
an eternal Trinity ; but that, on the other hand, the 
consciousness of Jesus and the beloved disciple, 
without giving them all the definitions of the later 
church doctrine, assured them that these names had 



SUMMARY OF RESULTS 215 

tlieir objective realities in the being of God, And 
hence the Nicene doctrine, so far as it relied on 
direct Scriptural authority, derived its strongest 
support from the fourth gospel. 

Our review has also shown us that the relation 
of the several divine Persons to each other was not 
apprehended in any definite form. The Father is 
evidently conceived as the source of all things in 
the Deity as well as outside of it ; for he is named 
Father especially in his relation to the Son, and in 
a less exclusive sense to believers. He is 6 Oe6<?, 
God, which term it is very doubtful whether it is 
ever applied to Christ or the Holy Ghost in the 
New Testament, except in the surprised outburst 
of Thomas, " My Lord and my God." ^ Christ is 
the Son — the only-begotten, St. John says. But 
how that begetting is to be understood is nowhere 
explained or hinted at. The Holy Ghost is sent 
by the Father, and proceeds from him ; but neither 
phrase appears to imply more than local proximity, 
and the moral unity which that presupposes. The 
Saviour says : " The Spirit of Truth " o Tmpa rov 
Trarpos eKTropeverat, " who proceeds from beside the 
Father," i. e, who is indeed the Spirit of Truth, 
because he goes forth from the immediate presence 
of the Father, the source of all truth. If the 

1 In the Apostolic Fathers, on the contrary, the term " God " 
is constantly used of Christ. Cf. Shedd, Hist. Doct., i. 265 ff. 



216 THE BEING OF GOD 

origin of the Holy Ghost is at all consciously re- 
ferred to in the New Testament, it is in the expres- 
sions " Spirit of God " and " Spirit of Christ." 

To sum up the result arrived at : The church of 
the New Testament was conscious of Father, Son, 
and Holy Ghost as the sources of all divine life 
and power. It had the Trinity practically, but 
not in clearly conceived doctrinal representation. 
It had the thought-elements out of which the doc- 
trine must inevitably be evolved, but it held them 
in simple, unarticulated juxtaposition, dominated 
only by the immovable conviction that God is one. 
Christ was the power of God and the wisdom 
of God; the Spirit of God was the ever-present 
Helper : in this there w^as no contradiction, and 
beyond this their thoughts did not habitually ex- 
tend. And is not this the ordinary thought of all 
Christians in all ages ? But it left two deep ques- 
tions unasked : First. How are the three related to 
the one being ? and secondly, How are they related 
to each other? It was with these questions that 
the church of the succeeding ages was forced to 
grapple. 



LECTUEE IX. 

THE TKINITY : ITS INTERPRETATIVE REVELATION. 

Of the three parts into which I divided the 
historical revelation of the Trinity, two have been 
considered. The third, the interpretative part of 
the process, must now engage us. That we are 
justified in viewing it as a constituent part of the 
revelation is almost self-evident. Nothing is more 
certain than that the doctrine of the Trinity sprang 
directly from the recognition of the Incarnation of 
God in Christ. The impulses to its conception 
and formulation are not to be sought in the philo- 
sophical speculations of the church fathers, but in 
their Christian consciousness. Philosophy aided in 
its development, but did not originate it. First 
came the assurance that God was in Christ (the 
immediate result of personal spiritual experience), 
and then came the endeavor to apprehend in 
thought the divine relations involved in the fact 
thus certified. The elaboration of the doctrine 
was the intellectual side of the spiritual new crea- 
tion. Herein lies the guaranty of its substantial 
truth. The emergence of the doctrine was not 



218 THE BEING OF GOD 

only historical, but historical revelation. It was 
revelation in and through the thinking of men 
whose whole being had been permeated with new 
life and power. To say that they were not infalli- 
ble is only to say that the new creation in them 
had not reached completeness ; but to say that, 
although renovated, they were not divinely guided 
in their thought — inspired — is to say that the 
union of man with God through Christ affects 
one part of the indivisible human personality, but 
not the other. Shall we admit that, in the Old 
Testament time of preparation, God made use of 
chosen men, specially endowed by nature and fitted 
by life-training, to lead and instruct his people, 
and then doubt that he has prophets and inspired 
thinkers in Christian ages? Such a doubt must 
either rest on inconsequent theories, or it must 
issue in a rejection of Christianity. 

As to the close of the period of interpretative 
revelation, I scarcely need to say that it cannot be 
definitely fixed. We may be fully assured that 
the results hitherto attained can never be reversed 
or materially changed, without asserting that they 
contain the whole truth to which nothing can ever 
be added. For our present purpose, however, we 
may consider the period to be closed with the com- 
pletion of the two great symbols, the Nicaeno- 
Constantinopolitan and the so-called Athanasian. 



TWO GREAT PROBLEMS 219 

It is therefore with the progressive formulation 
of the doctrine during the four centuries immedi- 
ately after the apostolic age that we are now to 
busy ourselves. 

The two questions which, as I said last week, 
came up for determination by the post-apostolic 
church, concerned the relations of Father, Son, 
and Holy Spirit, respectively, to the one Divine 
Being and to each other. The fundamental thought 
of Christianity is, that in Christ God has become 
man. As soon as men began to analyze this con- 
ception, the question necessarily arose : In what 
sense is this to be understood ? When we say, God 
became man, do we speak literally or figuratively? 
If literally, if Christ was really and truly God, 
was he alone God, or did God also continue to 
exist in the state of transcendence over all that 
is finite ? If the latter, are we not driven to the 
admission of two Gods, one incarnate and the 
other transcendent and immutable ? Or, if we dis- 
tinguish between God and the Logos, affirming 
that the latter became man, how is the Logos re- 
lated to the Godhead, and how to the human per- 
sonality of Jesus the Christ? Similar questions 
were again suggested by the divinity of the Holy 
Spirit. 

The working-out of problems of such profundity 
could not be accomplished in a day. And though 



220 THE BEING OF GOD 

upon the whole there was constant progress, yet, 
as the mind of the church is the aggregate of 
many minds, absolute unanimity at any stage is not 
to be expected. Although the main wave rolled 
in one direction, it was crossed and chopped by 
others of less volume running in other directions. 
Hence those heated theological battles which the 
untheological mind finds it so difficult to reconcile 
with the divine character of Christianity. But 
beside the difficulty of the questions involved, and 
the limitations of the thinking mind, we are to 
consider two other conditions that deeply affected 
Christian thought on this subject, divided it, and 
retarded the final conclusion. These are, first, the 
unequal diffusion of the Christian consciousness 
through the nominal Christian body ; and, sec- 
ondly, the very different conceptions of God which 
prevailed among different classes of men before 
they came into contact with Christianity. 

Let me dwell for a moment on the effects of the 
inequality of the Christian consciousness. If it be 
true, as I have insisted, that the Christian con- 
sciousness is the final and all-sufficient guaranty of 
Christian truth, how is it that this truth has been 
so variously apprehended, and has in every instance 
arrived at unanimity of statement only through 
rovious diversity of representation? That is a 
fair question, which must be fairly answered. And 



INEQUALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 221 

the answer is suggested in St. Paul's dictum, — 
" They are not all Israel who are of Israel." In 
other words, the church, the Christian communion, 
had in it, almost from the first, many who had no 
share, or one comparatively obscure, in the Chris- 
tian experience. Almost ? Judas was among the 
twelve, and the New Testament church, as inci- 
dentally depicted in the Epistles, is far from con- 
formed to its ideal. St. Paul was hounded from 
place to place by teachers who apparently had 
nothing of Christianity but the name. A new 
force in the world is sure to draw to it many who 
have not found what they wished in the old condi- 
tion. Despairing of the old, they take the new 
without really becoming one with it. You may 
find an illustration of this in the character of a 
part of the emigration from Europe to this coun- 
try. Despairing of realizing their communistic 
ideas in the Old World, they come here, expecting 
to find them acceptable and practicable, if not 
actually operative. Whatever they find here, in 
the way of constitution and law, they interpret, 
not as the national consciousness interprets it, but 
in accordance with their own imported conceptions. 
So men came to Christianity. The Jew was dis- 
heartened about his nation, especially after the 
Romans destroyed the temple and the Holy City. 
The serious-minded heathen felt that his ances- 



222 THE BEING OF GOD 

tral religion was dead and powerless. Meanwhile 
Christianity was advancing triumphantly, a new 
life-sphere in the midst of the old deadness. Nat- 
urally, average people who had just a spark of 
thought or life in them were attracted. They who 
thought more deeply, whether Jew or Gentile, 
might hold themselves aloof. But the mercurial 
multitude, ever ready for new things, poured into 
the church, just as among us they take up the lat- 
est literary novelty. Not all of this class were 
mere dilettanti, but very many of them never 
obtained a real and deep experience of the trans- 
forming power of Christianity. Nevertheless they 
counted among its more enlightened adherents, 
and here and there no doubt influenced the think- 
ing of their fellows. But as the thinking so influ- 
enced was not dominated by the Christian con- 
sciousness, it failed to accord with it. Whether 
the thinkers were Jews or Gentiles did not essen- 
tially affect the result. 

But there was another class, — a class which did 
experience the power of Christ, but explained it 
from a false intellectual basis. This leads us to 
the different conceptions of God entertained by 
persons before they came into contact with Chris- 
tianity. Human thought about God has always 
divided on what we are accustomed to call trans- 
cendence or immanence, — taking the former word 



DIFFERENT IDEAS OF GOD 223 

as the direct contrary of the latter. The Jew, 
ever since the return from the captivity, had so 
emphasized the transcendence as to make him un- 
able to conceive of God as coming into any other 
than mediated contact with man. The Greek was 
divided. So far as he accepted the Platonic phi- 
losophy or its later revivals, he took his place by 
the side of the Jew. But if he had yielded to the 
doctrines of the Stoics, a waning philosophy in the 
early Christian centuries, it is true, but yet by no 
means uninfluential ; or if, despairing of the teach- 
ings of the schools, he had reverted to that of the 
poets, in which the genuine spirit of his race found 
expression, he could not but conceive of God as 
indwelling in all his works. This was what we 
may call his natural, native conception. Philoso- 
phy might override it, or hold it in abeyance, but 
could not eradicate it. And nothing was more 
natural, if for any reason philosophy lost its hold 
on him, than that he should feel himself attracted 
by the teaching of Christ, in the profound sim- 
plicity, poetic beauty, and all-pervading God-con- 
sciousness of whose own words — unrivaled by 
the noblest utterances that ever fell from apostolic 
lips — the most attractive thought of his ancestral 
religion seemed to, meet him, purified of all error 
and raised to unspeakable sublimity. The conse- 
quences of these mental antecedents, as regards 



224 THE BEIXG OF GOD 

the conception of the Trinity, may readily be in- 
ferred. The Jewish mind tended towards Ebioni- 
tism, i. e. the reception of Jesus as the Christ, the 
Messiah, but also as mere man. The Greek ad- 
herent of the Platonic idea of transcendence migfht 
make Christ a mediator between God and men, 
but could not conceive of a real Incarnation. The 
natural Greek mind, on the other hand, not con- 
trolled by an adverse philosophy, had an innate 
readiness to incarnate Deity. It may be doubted 
whether the doctrine of the Trinity could ever 
have taken deep root on Jewish soil. The very 
vehemence of its protest against everything that 
seemed to endanger monotheism unfitted the Jew- 
ish mind for the conception of this doctrine, or of 
any idea that necessitated it. If, nevertheless, the 
original data, out of which the docti'ine could not 
fail to grow, were given in Jewish minds, on 
Jewish soil, this is strong evidence of their divine 
origin. 

To trace the course taken by the development 
of the doctrine is, for my purpose, neither necessary 
nor possible. It is enough to indicate the main 
currents of thought, and their relation to the Chris- 
tian consciousness. As the movement derived its 
impulse from the life and work of Christ, its first 
and most important concern was with his relation 
to God. The doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit 



EBIONITISM 225 

assumed prominence at a later time. We shall do 
best to observe the same order. 

The age immediately after that of the apostles 
was the age of simple faith and simple people. 
Judging by the few writings of this time that re- 
main to us, it was emphatically the age in which 
*' not many wise men after the flesh, not many 
mighty, not many noble, were called." The fifty 
years that followed the death of St. John seem to 
have been a time of stationary repose in Christian 
thought. Converts were instructed and baptized 
according to New Testament formulae and prece- 
dents ; but there was no inquiry into the internal 
relation of God to himself implied in Christian 
teaching. But as soon as new sources of informa- 
tion present themselves, we behold an unceasing 
activity of thought concentrated on the question, 
" What think ye of the Christ ? whose son is he ? " 

The Ebionites, a party or parties composed of 
Jewish believers in Jesus as the Messiah, including 
here and there, it may be, a few Gentile proselytes, 
and having their abodes in Palestine and adjacent 
regions, replied boldly and baldly : " He is man, 
pure and simple, — anointed with the spirit of pro- 
phecy beyond other prophets, but differing from 
them only in degree." This was the outcome of 
their Jewish conception of God. Moreover, the 
phraseology of the Jewish Scriptures, which de- 



226 THE BEING OF GOD 

scribe Jeliovali's king over Israel as his Son, fur- 
nished them with a ready explanation of the term 
" Son of God " applied to Christ. 

Ebionitism was but a poor form of baptized Ju- 
daism. It had neither life nor thought. But, as 
to thought at least, the case is different with sev- 
eral Ebionizing parties or teachers found in vari- 
ous parts of ancient Gentile Christendom. None 
of these present the doctrine in Ebionite bareness ; 
most of them seek to raise Christ to a certain 
uniqueness among men, but all leave him at last 
a mere man. The human alone supplies the per- 
sonality, the divine permeates and endows it. He 
is not God incarnate in any sense which does not 
also apply in varying degrees to other prophets 
and elect persons. Hence, also, he is not the crea- 
tor of new spiritual life, but only the awakener of 
what lay dormant in man. Such, with many dif- 
ferences in reaching and stating the final result, 
was the doctrine of the Alogi, of whom we hear in 
Asia Minor, the adherents of Theodotus (or rather 
the two Theodoti) and Artemon at Eome, and Paul 
of Samosata at Antioch in Syria. But Ebionitism 
in every form was disowned as soon as it was rec- 
ognized. The Christ-consciousness of the ancient 
church was much too vigorous and clear to find 
satisfaction in it. Much as it might long for in- 
tellectual comprehension, it preferred the incom- 



PATBIPASSIANISM 227 

prehensible to that which reduced its spiritual ex- 
perience to relative, if not absolute, delusion. 

Diametrically opposed to the Ebionizing doc- 
trine was that of the so-called Patripassians. This 
looked upon Christ as the Incarnate God, but 
would hear of no real distinction between the Fa- 
ther and the Son. These were only names for one 
and the same being. The term Son applied only 
to Jesus, the historical personage, in whom God 
himself appeared clothed in the form of humanity. 
The best known representatives of this doctrine 
are Praxeas (who went from Asia Minor to Rome, 
and taught there) ; Noetus of Smyrna, Beryl of 
Bostra in Arabia (whom Origen induced to recant), 
and the famous Sabellius, who gave it its high- 
est, most thoroughly developed form. Unlike the 
Ebionitic doctrine, this form of ancient Unitarian- 
ism did not come into conflict with the Christian 
consciousness of the people in its simple form of 
personal spiritual experience. On the contrary, it 
was the crude, intellectually undigested expression 
of that experience. Hence, when Praxeas appeared 
at Rome, there came a speedy end to the Ebionitism 
that was seeking to establish itself there.^ Indeed, 
it scarcely admits of a doubt that it was not only 
an old doctrine, — Justin Martyr (Trypho, ch. 128) 
already alludes to it, — but widely current among 
1 Cf . Dorner, Person Christi, i. 522 f. 



228 THE BEING OF GOD 

the masses of believers. It seemed to do away 
with all subordinationism, to give inconceivable 
value to the work and sacrificial death of Christ, 
and to present the Infinite God in the character of 
immediate sympathetic participant in all the suffer- 
ings and temptations of life in a sinful world. Of 
this the simple believer felt his need ; and to the 
possession of this in Christ, his experience testified. 
But the Christian consciousness is not a merely 
passive subject. In the first flush of deliverance 
and new life, or if awakened while the intellect is 
in a state of childlike immaturity until that is 
changed, it may be content to rest in its spiritual 
experiences. But the time must come when it will 
begin to think about its own contents, and seek 
to explain and harmonize them with other truth. 
Now, it was impossible, when the mind once began 
to reflect on the subject, to suppose that, while 
Christ through his incarnation was subject to all 
the limitations of time and space, God could have 
absolutely laid aside his transcendence over these, 
and left the universe without its head and support. 
And this conclusion of reason found its fullest 
corroboration in the utterances of Christ himself. 
Moreover, while the Christian consciousness can 
never knowingly accept in thought that which con- 
travenes its experience, it may recognize elements 
of truth in what as a whole it must reject, as well 



IMPULSE TO DEEPER THOUGHT 229 

as error in what it accepts. Hence, while it re- 
jected all Ebionitic conceptions of Christ as utterly- 
inadequate, it recognized the value of the humanity 
of the Kedeemer on which Ebionitism one-sidedly 
insisted, and also saw that Patripassianism with 
equal one-sidedness virtually excluded it, and thus 
jeopardized the very treasure it sought to guard. 
For the Patripassian Jesus was more or less a de- 
lusive phantom, not a true man. The Incarnation 
was not real. The human was but a veil or gar- 
ment of the divine. The passion of Jesus, his hu- 
man sharing in suffering, and the promise of exal- 
tation that his brotherhood held out to men, were 
all weakened and rendered doubtful, when the re- 
flecting mind felt itself forced to the conclusion 
that the appearance of God in the semblance of 
man had been a spectacle, a scenic display, not a 
reality. Such a discovery would have been destruc- 
tion to a faith resting on anything less secure than 
personal experience of redemption and renovation. 
To the ancient church it merely supplied a stimu- 
lus to thought. It revealed the problem, and urged 
to its solution. Christ was God and Christ was 
man ; and the problem was not, as Nicodemus 
would have put it, How can this be ? but How is 
it? That was the starting-point of the long de- 
bate, which found not a complete but its essential 
answer in the decision of the Council of Nicsea. 



230 THE BEING OF GOB 

The intellectual movement tkrougli wMcli this 
answer was attained is the noblest in the history of 
thought. Though unmistakably marked by human 
imperfections of every kind, abounding in mutual 
misapprehensions, defects of reasoning, obscurity 
of expression, and sadly overshadowed by its con- 
comitants of hatred and oppression, it discloses to 
the sympathetic mind most convincing evidence of 
the directing presence of the Spirit of Truth. It 
is much too vast to be even barely outlined in the 
time at our command. All we can do is to note 
a few chief waymarks along its course. And of 
those we must choose only such as bear directly on 
our subject, which you must remember is the Trin- 
ity, not the Incarnation, which has been assigned 
to another lecturer. 

It was doubtless under the influence of Greek 
philosophy, in which many of the earlier Christian 
teachers were well versed, that the thought of the 
church concentrated itseK on the name Logos 
given by St. John to the Son of God. The Logos 
was with God in the beginning ; the Logos was the 
only-begotten Son of God ; and the Logos was 
God. Here was identity and yet difference, God- 
head and yet Sonship. How were these relations 
to be conceived consistently with the unity of God ? 
Concerning the Deity of the Logos there was no 
uncertainty. It may well be that the loftiest 



THE DEITY OF THE SON 231 

ascriptions of divine attributes to him were made 
when, for the moment, the real distinction between 
him and the Father, in which the whole difficulty- 
comes to view, was lost sight of ; but they sprang 
from convictions that never wavered. The philo- 
sophically trained fathers took the term Logos 
in the twofold sense of Keason and Word, al- 
though St. John used it only in the latter. Rea- 
son and Word, both immaterial things, connected 
readily with the idea of God as the Infinite Spirit, 
the pure Intelligence and Energy. The Reason 
as immanent in Deity, and the Creative Word 
as issuing from him, presented, so to speak, the 
groundwork on which the doctrine of the Trinity 
was reared. They formed nominal distinctions 
which served as stepping-stones to the real, essen- 
tial distinctions ; but they were also liable to be 
confused or unconsciously interchanged, which ac- 
counts for much that is obscure or contradictory in 
the writings of the fathers. In both forms the 
Logos is God : as Reason, immanent in God, he is 
necessarily eternal, "timeless and beginningless." 
But the distinction between God and the Reason 
of God was too liable to be regarded as identical 
with that between subject and attribute, and might 
easily lead to Patripassianism. Besides, specula- 
tive thought. Old Testament Jewish as well as Phi- 
Ionic Greek, had postulated the necessity of a real, 



232 THE BEING OF GOB 

objective distinction in the Divine Being in order 
to the production of the universe, and the New 
Testament ascribed this very work to the Logos, 
the Son and " image of the invisible God, the first- 
born of all creation" (CoL i. 13 ff.). Hence the 
Logos, the Creative Word, was defined as the im- 
manent Reason issuing forth from the Divine Be- 
ing for external action. The danger of making 
him a mere attribute was thereby, if not averted, 
greatly lessened, for it made it almost impossible to 
conceive him otherwise than as a conscious actor. 
But it also opened up a new series of questions. 
What was the nature of this going forth, and 
when did it take place? The first question was 
answered by a variety of expressions, all of them, 
however, recognized as more or less metaphorical. 
Thus the Logos was said to come forward (emerge) 
out of God, to be projected (thrown out) by God, 
and, with special reference to New Testament 
phraseology, to be uttered by Him (as Word), 
and to be begotten by the Father. The important 
point at issue was, whether the genesis or genera- 
tion of the Son, as a distinct personality, was of 
the nature of emanation, i. e. derivation, from the 
essence of the Father, or of creation. The latter 
was seen to be utterly irreconcilable with the true 
Deity of the Son, and therefore negatived. Arian- 
ism, which accepted it, was thereby rejected. The 



THE DEITY OF THE SON 238 

otiier alternative, though nearer the truth, was not 
without hidden elements of danger. As it made 
the Son's existence a derivation from the Father's 
essence, — of which more anon, — and conceived it 
effected by the Father's will, it involved the sub- 
ordination of the Son to the Father, which again 
endangered his absolute Deity, and also made it 
difficult to maintain the Unity. 

As to the time of the Son's generation, the 
prevalent view, before Origen, placed it immedi- 
ately before the creation of the world. God willed 
the Logos or Son, hitherto immanent in himself as 
impersonal reason, into the state of personal, inde- 
pendent existence, and then through him created 
all things. It is true, there were those who, like 
Clement of Alexandria, held to the eternity of the 
Logos ; but it is doubtful whether they conceived 
of him as a person. But the commoner view, while 
it saved the Deity of the Son as to nature and es- 
sence, could not explain how he could have the 
attribute of eternity, and thus made him inferior to 
the Father. Moreover, it came into conflict with 
the immutableness of the Divine Being. These dif- 
ficulties were obviated by Origen's doctrine of the 
eternal generation. The light, he said, cannot 
but shine, — it is never without its luminous glow ; 
so, also, the Father cannot be thought without a 
Son. There was never a time when the Son was 



234 THE BEING OF GOD 

not.i That is, the generation was not a momentary 
act, done once for all. It is an eternal process 
within the Divine Being, by which God unintermit- 
tently differentiates himself to himseK as Father 
and Son. 

Such were the steps, roughly sketched and 
grouped according to their logical rather than 
chronological connection, by which the ancient 
church elaborated the leading conceptions that 
enter into the doctrine of the Trinity. "VYe shall 
soon see how the Council of Nicsea, occasioned by 
the Arian controversies, combined them, and in its 
creed registered the progress made down to its 
time. But first I must add a word on the doctrine 
concerning the Holy Spirit. The same compara- 
tive want of definite conceptions, which we found 
to characterize the Christian consciousness of the 
apostolic age on this subject, continued generally 
throughout the ante-Nicene age, and for the same 
reasons. The work and manifestations of the 
Spirit were not so peculiar in form as to force im- 
mediate inquiry. The task of determining the 
relations of Christ to God absorbed all powers of 
thought. When, in the early Christian age, Jews 
censure the Christian doctrine of God, it is always 
assumed to teach two di\dne persons, not three.^ 

^ Domer, Person Christi, i. 642, 

2 Weber, Altsynag. Paldst. TheoL, p. 148. 



THE TRINITY AND THE HOLY SPIRIT 235 

Whatever inference this may justify can, however, 
only be considered to appl}^ to Jewish Christians. 
As to the general body of believers, the evidence 
is meagre, and so obscure as to admit of various 
interpretations.^ That all recognized the Holy 
Spirit as one of the sacred Triad cannot be 
doubted. But some of the fathers speak of him 
very indefinitely ; while others seem to confuse, if 
not the persons, the functions, of the Logos and the 
Spirit in a surprising manner. Origen seems to 
have regarded the Spirit as a divine person, the 
first and greatest of the " all things " that were 
made by the Logos. Certain it is that both he 
and others subordinated the Spirit to the Father 
and the Son, as they subordinated the Son to the 
Father. Of course, Arius and his followers could 
not admit the true Deity of the Spirit while they 
denied that of the Son. Yet the Creed of Nicaea 
made but one brief statement (less explicit in fact, 
though not designedly so, than the utterances of 
the Apostles' Creed), viz., " We believe in the Holy 
Ghost." The true explanation of this surprising 
fact is doubtless that the main body of the church 
was not ready to accept any intellectual interpre- 
tation of its spiritual experience in a region where 
it received so few hints from apostolic tradition to 
direct it. Wholesome fear of rash speculation, 
1 Cf , Neand., Ch. Hist, l 603 ff. 



236 THE BEING OF GOD 

of wMch there liad already been but too much, 
probably restrained many who would have urged 
no other objections. Certainly Athanasius cannot 
have been the only one at Nicaea who had pene- 
trated to the deeper view. It may be that he and 
they purposely and prudently refrained from im- 
periling the one definition of supreme importance 
by combining with it another that could better 
wait, and would be sure to follow. 

It is time now to give a brief outline of the for- 
mulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, through 
the several stages represented by the creeds that 
come into consideration here. The Nicene Creed 
asserted the true Deity of Christ in the most va- 
ried terms. He is declared to be the " Son of God, 
begotten from the Father an Only-begotten, that is, 
of the essence of the Father, God from God, Light 
from Light, True God from True God ; begotten, 
not made, of the same essence (homoousio'ii) with 
the Father." That which is still lacking, namely, 
the conception of the generation as out of all time 
relations, is supplied by the closing condemnation 
of Arian phraseology and (alas !) its defenders : 
" And those who say, ' there was a time when he 
was not,' and ' before he was begotten he was not,' 
and ' he sprang from things that are not,' or allege 
that the Son of God is of a different substance or 
essence, or created, changeable or mutable, the 



FORMULATION OF THE DOCTRINE 237 

Catholic Church anathematizes." It would seem 
difficult to express and guard more fully the con- 
ception of the Son as eternally coexistent and con- 
substantial with the Father. Both his true Deity 
and his distinction from the Father are affirmed. 
But the relation of the Father and the Son to the 
one Deity, the divine Monad, is not indicated, or 
rather it is obscured. The Father is represented 
as the " one God," ^ who out of his essence begets 
the Son. The homoousion of the creed can there- 
fore only be taken as meaning " of the same es- 
sence as to quality." The sense "of the same 
essence numerically " can scarcely have been up- 
permost when that phrase was used ; for how could 
the Father give of his essence to the Son without 
dividing it, unless he gave the whole and denuded 
himself ? The better conception we shall find to 
be that the begetting of the Son by the Father has 
nothing to do with the communication of the divine 
essence, but only with the origination of the hypo- 
static (personal) relation of Father and Son. The 
failure of the creed to bring out the relation of the 
persons in the Trinity to the Unity of the Godhead 
leaves the Deity of the Son (not his Sonship 
merely) dependent on the Father, and therefore 
subordinate to the Deity of the Father. The 

^ ' ' We believe in one God, Father Almighty, . . . and in one 
Lord, Jesus Christ," etc. Cf. Gies., Ch. Hist., i 297, n. 7. 



238 THE BEING OF GOD 

Council most certainly did not aim at this result ; ^ 
but it is logically involved in their language. The 
Council of Constantinople mitigated this defect, 
without however removing it, by dropping the ex- 
pression, " begotten of the essence of the Father." 
Whether it was done intentionally, or otherwise, is 
not known. 

The chief alterations made in the Nicene Creed 
by the Council of Constantinople (a. d. 381) were 
designed to extend the Nicene definitions to the 
Holy Spirit, with immediate reference to the errors 
of the Macedonians and other Pneumatomachians, 
as they were called, who for the most part regarded 
the Holy Spirit as a created being, the " servant 
and attendant " of God. The Council declared 
the Holy Spirit to be " the Lord [cf. 2 Cor. iii. 
17], the Giver of Life [John vi. 63], who pro- 
ceeds from the Father [John xv. 26], who with 
the Father and the Son together is worshiped and 
glorified, who spake through the prophets." The 
article appears to be a compromise on the basis of 
Scriptural terms (the true exegesis of which is not 
very carefully inquired into), but it clearly aims to 
inculcate the Nicene doctrine as applied to the 
Holy Spirit. It virtually includes the homoousion 
without expressing it. A few years before, a Ro- 
man synod, under Damasus, had already declared 

1 Cf . Dorner, Person ChrisU, i. 929 ff. 



PBOGBESS AFTER CONSTANTINOPLE 239 

the Holy Spirit to be of one power and substance 
with the Father and the Son. About the same 
time an Illyrian synod had said that " the triad, 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit " is Tiomoousion} Al- 
most twenty years before Constantinople, a synod 
at Alexandria, presided over by Athanasius, de- 
clared the same doctrine.^ A very large part of the 
Council of Constantinople would undoubtedly have 
accepted the term unhesitatingly. But with or 
without the homoousion^ the creed exhibits in its 
new form the incompleteness there was in the old. 
The relation of the Three to the One is left unde- 
termined, as also that of the Spirit and the Son to 
each other. 

I cannot say that every trace of these defects was 
removed, but they were greatly reduced by the 
western church, chiefly under impulses from the 
powerful mind of Augustine. Over and over again 
this father asserts the filioque^ the procession of the 
Spirit from the Father and the Son^ long before 
the Toledan synod of A. D. 589 inserted the word 
into the creed of Constantinople.^ This addition, 
of no great importance in itself, effectively counter- 
acted the lingering subordinationism of the East. 

1 Cf. Gies., Ch. Hist, i. 312, n. 35 ; Hefele, Hist, of Councils, 
sect. 39 f . 

2 Gieseler, i. 306. 

3 Cf. Hagenbaeh, Hist. Boot, i. 264, n. 5. 



240 THE BEING OF GOD 

On the relation of the Persons to the Unity, Au- 
gustine is equally decided: ''Father, Son, and 
Holy Spirit together are not greater as to essence 
than the Father alone or the Son alone; but the 
three Hypostases or Persons (if they can be so 
named), taken together, are equal to each taken 
separately. . . . The Trinity itself is the one God, 
— the one God in the same sense that he is the one 
Creator : what do they mean who say that the Son 
created all things at the command of the Father, 
as if the Father had not created, but had ordered 
it to be done by the Son ? They fashion for them- 
selves, in the imagination of their hearts as it were, 
two beings, mutually near, yet each occupying his 
own place, — one commanding, the other obedi- 
ently complying. Nor do they perceive that the 
command of the Father, that all things be made, is 
itself nothing else than the Word of the Father 
through which all things were made." ^ In this 
language speaks a clear perception of the nature 
of the personal or hypostatic distinctions in the 
Trinity, and of their relations to the Unity and to 
each other. It may have been as clearly appre- 
hended (though, so far as I know, not taught) by 
Athanasius and the great Cappadocians, especially 
Gregory of Nyssa. But Augustine influenced its 
formulation in a creed-statement. It is the opinion 
1 Gies., Ch. Hist, i. 313, n. 41. 



PROGRESS AFTER CONSTANTINOPLE 241 

of Neander and Hagenbacli that the Athanasian 
Creed originated in Augustine's own century and 
country, while Gieseler puts it in the seventh cen- 
tury and in Spain. However that may be, the for- 
mula breathes the Augustinian spirit and thought. 
It sedulously guards against breaking up the di- 
vine essence into three parts, so as to make three 
Gods, who are one only in the nominal sense in 
which three individuals are one family. Nor, on 
the other hand, does it allow the eternally imma- 
nent distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost 
to be obliterated, or in the slightest degree ob- 
scured ; but, eschewing every approach to the intro- 
duction of notions of rank or degree within the 
Deity as between the Three, it endows all alike 
with equal eternity, immensity, power, and glory, 
and finds the notes of the personal distinctions be- 
tween them in the time-honored Scriptural terms 
" generation " a,nd '' procession," which, while they 
explain nothing, assist the mind to keep its hold 
on relations of which the imagination can form no 
adequate conception. The great defect of this, and 
perhaps of every creed that was ever drawn up, 
is that it makes no explicit use of the Origenistie 
conception of the " generation " (and, by parity of 
reasoning, of the " procession " also) as an eternal 
process, without end as well as without beginning. 
That thought lies behind the expression " begotten 



242 THE BEING OF GOD 

before all ages," and all other affirmations of tlie 
timelessness of tlie generation ; but only he can 
find it who knows that it is there to be found. Yet 
in it we have the means of approximately compre- 
hending what in its completeness must forever 
transcend the powers of finite intelligence. 

We have not, I trust, lost sight of the purpose 
and bearing of the review that has engaged our 
thoughts. I have not been trying to prove the doc- 
trine of the Trinity, by the authority of either the 
Scriptures, the church, or the reason. I have 
sought to exhibit it as the deliverance of the Chris- 
tian consciousness, and therefore to that conscious- 
ness self-attesting. The whole argument is simply 
this : Christian experience of spiritual redemption, 
freedom, life, and strength, being an experience of 
divine creative power in the soul, evokes sponta- 
neous recognition of the Deity (Divinity, if you 
will) of Christ and the Holy Spirit, by whom the 
effects are wrought. This is the universal fact of 
Christianity. It was not in their experience, but 
in the theories to which it gave rise, that men dif- 
fered in the early church. Patripassian, Sabel- 
lian, Arian, Semi-Arian, Nicene, all genuine Chris- 
tians, had essentially the same personal experience 
of the life that had come from heaven to earth. 
The same is true to-day. The foundation of the 



DOCTRINE OF TRINITY— SUMMING UP 243 

Trinitarian doctrine, however faint or disguised, is 
found in every one to whom a Christian church 
is something more than a Mohammedan mosque, 
Buddhist temple, or even Jewish synagogue. The 
experience of the power of the Incarnation is the 
foundation of all Christian dogmatic certitude. No 
doctrine rooted in it can fall, and none without this 
rooting can permanently stand. 

My endeavor to-day has been to show that the 
doctrine of the Trinity, as formulated by the church, 
is the necessary outcome of the facts of Christian 
experience ; that it resulted from no arbitrary 
system-making proclivity, but from the imperative 
necessity of rejecting conceptions which involved 
a denial of the Incarnation ; that no definition was 
made until after the most thorough and protracted 
discussion, and then only within limits that barely 
sufficed to cover the point of danger. To this I 
now add that the men who led the thinking and 
gave expression to its results were almost without 
exception, intellectually and spiritually, the most 
richly endowed of their day and generation. What 
the great prophets were to ancient Israel, that the 
great fathers were to the Christian church. On 
the one hand, they impersonated the life of the 
Christian people, its faith, love, and hope, in their 
highest form ; and on the other, they were the fitly 
chosen organs through whom the Spirit of Truth 



244 THE BEING OF GOD 

imparted enlightenment and instruction to the vast 
body of the faithful. They were — why should I 
hesitate to use the word ? — the inspired interpret- 
ers of God's historical self-revelation in the Chris- 
tian consciousness. 

One final word of practical bearing on your fu- 
ture work as Christian teachers. The importance 
of the doctrine cannot be overestimated. All dis- 
tinctively Christian truth stands or falls with it ; 
for all Christian truth presupposes it, and it in turn 
presupposes all Christian truth. This fact, while 
it shows its importance, also indicates how it is to 
be taught. It is not to be exhibited as a matter of 
abstract philosophical theology. Nor is it to be 
laboriously deduced from this proof-text or that, as 
a doctrine which it hath pleased God to reveal, 
and which must therefore be reverently believed. 
Neither is it to be relegated to one Sunday in the 
year. If it does not shine through all your doc- 
trine throughout the year. Trinity Sunday cannot 
fail to be dreaded by yourself, and a weariness to 
your hearers. The teaching must take the charac- 
ter and follow the order of the original revelation. 
The sense of sin must be evoked, the mute longings 
of the soul after God must be interpreted, that re- 
ceptivity of the spirit which is the essence of faith 
must be developed, the divine Redeemer must be 



DOCTRINE OF TRINITY— SUMMING UP 245 

presented in the fullness of his grace and love, the 
workings of the invigorating, inspiring indwelling 
of the Holy Ghost must be unweariedly delineated. 
And all this not in the dry form of dogmatic teach- 
ing, but in the warm glow of living experience. 
To a congregation thus guided into the perception 
of Christian truth. Trinity Sunday will bring no 
new or strange message, but simply the summing 
up and necessary outcome of all it has lived and 
felt and thought. The doctrine of the Trinity will 
have been built up in and with its spiritual life. 
The intellectual side of such a living belief will 
doubtless vary as mental capacity and historical 
knowledge vary, but it can never be insufficient 
for the practical purposes of the Christian life. 
And on the other hand, no intellectual apprehen- 
sion, however perfect, without this basis in per- 
sonal spiritual life, would be of value. 



LECTURE X. 

THE SPECULATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DOC- 
TRINE OF THE TRINITY. 

We have traced the origin and development of 
the doctrine until its formulation in the great sym- 
bols of the church. Can we now do anything to 
make it more readily grasped by the mind ? Ob- 
serve, I do not say, Can we establish it on a se- 
curer basis? That, it must be admitted at once, 
cannot be done. Nor is it needed. The doctrine 
has its solid foundation in the life experience of 
the Christian church. It is a most practical doc- 
trine, and continually meets with practical veri- 
fication from experience. To such as lack the 
Christian consciousness, it might be a highly inter- 
esting metaphysical truth, but could scarcely be of 
spiritual efficacy, although it were demonstrable 
with the certainty of a proposition in geometry. 
But something can be done to show that there is 
no contradiction in it ; to make it more conceiv- 
able, more congenial, so to speak, to the mind. 
And that cannot but be welcome to the most as- 
sured believer. Even the doubter may perhaps 



''PEBSON'' DEFINED 247 

be made to see that there is in it more that is rea- 
sonable and probable than he had thought. 

The popular objection that three cannot be one 
derives its whole force from the assumption that 
the same noun is to be supplied to each numeral. 
The very absurdity of what it denies ought to be 
enough to warn any rational mind that it can be 
of no avail against the Christian doctrine. Of 
course, three persons cannot be one person, if in 
each case by " person " a true, individual person- 
ality be understood. I have already explained that 
when, for want of a better word, we speak of 
three " persons," we do not use the term in the 
sense of personality. Personality implies what in 
philosophy is called an " ego," a self, — not mere 
consciousness, but self -consciousness and self -de- 
termining will. We certainly do not mean that 
in the Trinity there are three egos, three inde- 
pendent wills.^ What we do mean is that God 
has in himself three centres or foci of conscious- 
ness, in and through each of which his one per- 
sonality utters itself. In each of these centres 
the whole of the one and indivisible divine life 
focalizes itself in all its fullness, not successively 
nor alternately, now in one, now in the other, but 
simultaneously and eternally. Thus each centre 
is full of personality ; but it is the one personality 
1 Cf. Dr. Kedney, Christ. Doct. Harmonized, i. chap. xi. 



248 THE BEING OF GOD 

of the one God. Moreover, each centre is to be 
conceived as specially related to different lines 
of divine action, — the one to works of power and 
creation, the other to works of executive wisdom, 
the third to works of unifying mediation. All the 
divine perfections are active in each, but so as to 
converge to different immediate ends. Herein we 
have the ontological ground for the different forms 
under which the three hypostases are apprehended 
by us in history and revelation : the economic 
Trinity, the Trinity of manifestation, has its neces- 
sary basis in eternal distinctions within the God- 
head. 

Let us now bring this into connection with the 
creed statements. When the creeds speak of the 
essence of God, they denote the spirit-substance of 
his being, — the to us incomprehensible substratum 
or vehicle of his personality. What I have called 
" centres," in which the one personality of God 
focalizes itself, as our personality may be said to 
focalize itself in the brain, the creeds call the " per- 
sons " of the Trinity. They act as the organs of 
personal being, and therefore the name, though 
liable to misinterpretation, is not wholly inappro- 
priate. When the creeds say that the persons are 
hoynoousion^ of the same essence, they mean that 
each has the whole essence of the one Deity as 
the substratum of his own existence. The divine 



THE CREED STATEMENTS 249 

essence is not divided among them, so much to one, 
so much to the other, but all is in each, because 
each is a centre of consciousness of the one Person- 
ality. Of course, the fathers of the church knew 
fully as well as we that God is immaterial, that we 
cannot properly ascribe substance or essence to 
him, except by abstracting from these terms every- 
thing that is cognizable by mortal sense-perception ; 
but it was in this way that they sought to express 
the absolute oneness of the Divine Being, and the 
absolute deity of each of the hypostases or persons. 
When, finally, the creeds say that the Son is begot- 
ten of the Father, and that the Holy Ghost pro- 
ceeds from the Father and the Son, they use Scrip- 
tural terms, the exact import of which no one ever 
pretended to determine, but which in general were 
understood to denote derivation of being, without, 
however, involving origin in time, — all three were 
conceived to be coeternal. How that may be made 
more comprehensible, we shall see further on. For 
the present it is enough if we have clearly pos- 
sessed ourselves of the Christian conception of 
the Trinity, — that God has in himself three cen- 
tres of consciousness, in each of which his one 
personality focalizes itself, and works in lines pecu- 
liar to each. 

Physical illustrations of spiritual relations so 
transcendent can illustrate nothing, although they 



250 THE BEING OF GOD 

may seem to do so. Nevertheless they have been 
used from the days of the fathers until our own. 
A few examples will show their character. There 
is the analogy of the fountain, the river, and the 
current ; of the fire, its light and its heat ; of the 
cloud, the rain, and the mist of evaporation. 
These, it may be allowed, furnish the ideas of deri- 
vation, diversity in form or mode of subsistence, 
and movement, but they utterly break down on the 
numerical homoousion^ or identity of essence, the 
only point that would give them value. Others 
are still more unsatisfactory. Consider the exam- 
ples of the root, trunk, and branches of a tree ; the 
form, color, and perfume of a flower ; the size, 
shape, and color of any object whatever. Here 
we have mere triads of parts or properties in one 
object. As to some of them, we can see no ne- 
cessary mutual relations between them, except that 
of coexistence, e. g. size, shape, color ; in others 
it does not appear what ground there is for find- 
ing a triad rather than a quartette or any other 
composite of parts, — e. g. to the roots, trunk, 
branches, of a tree, why not add leaves and fruit ? 
It is true, none of these or similar illustrations 
were offered to prove the Trinity in Unity, but 
merely to suggest some conception of how it may 
be. But as they all lack the element of conscious 
personal life, they at best leave the matter where 



ST. AUGUSTINE'S ANALOGY 251 

they found it. They may even result in darken- 
ing counsel by words without knowledge. The in- 
quiring mind, arrested by the offered analogy o£ 
the fountain, the river, and the current, may ask. 
Wherein lies the unity of these ? In the whole 
body of water ? Then the three are different parts 
of the unit, but not three modes under each of 
which the whole appears ; for the water that is at 
any moment in the fountain is not the water that 
is in the river. They may be of the same nature, 
but they are not numerically the same. Thus we 
reach a composite God. Does the unity lie in 
that body of water which is at any moment in the 
fountain ? Then that which is now fountain will 
anon be river and current. The unity evidently 
passes through different phases. The same sub- 
stance is now exclusively fountain, anon river or 
current, — the doctrine of Sabellianism. Is the 
unity merely a matter of thought ? Fountain, 
river, and current, being connected in various ways, 
are they for that reason conceived as one ? Then 
the unity is an abstraction ; the real thing is the 
three, — -Tritheism. 

A much higher class of analogies, gradually ris- 
ing into what deserve to be called efforts to con- 
struct the Trinity by speculative reasoning, are 
based upon the assumption that, since man was 
made in the image of God, there must be in his 



252 THE BEING OF GOD 

spiritual nature hints and shadows, at least, of 
what the divine nature is. The analogy was at 
first sought in the three powers of the soul, — the in- 
tellect, the will, and the affections ; but Augustine, 
with profounder insight into all the conditions of 
the problem, endeavored to find it in the human 
self-consciousness. The three words of which he 
makes use in his subtlest reasonings on this subject 
are memory, the intellect, and wall. Instead of 
" will " he also uses " love ; " for, says he, " what 
else is love than will ? " ^ And in truth will, wish, 
desire, love, readily flow into each other. By 
" memory " he understands what may be called the 
thought-material which lies latent in the mind, 
before the intellect converts it into conscious 
thought, — the unshaped thought to which the cog- 
nitive faculty gives form.^ Hence he also substi- 
tutes " the mind itself " for it. Thus, he says, 
" we have a sort of image of the Trinity in the 
mind itself, together with its knowledge of itself, 
which is its offspring and its word concerning it- 
self, and thirdly love." ^ These words also indi- 
cate the drift of his reasoning. The mind or mem- 
ory is a storehouse of latent, inert knowledge. It 
or any part of it may have been true, quick know- 

1 De Trin., xv. 38. 

2 Cf. De Trin., xv. 40, and Baur, Dreieinigkeitslekre, i. 869. 
^ De Trin., hi. 18. 



MELANCTHON'S ARGUMENT 253 

ledge ouce, and have been relegated into obscurity 
again (hence the term " memory ") ; but it be- 
comes and is true and actual knowledge only when 
the intellect takes cognizance of it. Then the 
mind knows objectively what until then it held in 
latency. But the activity of the intellect on the 
contents of the " memory " springs from an impulse 
of the will (or love). Thus every act of know- 
ledge is the result of the interaction of these three 
functions of the mind. Now, as self-consciousness 
is an act of knowledge, it can only arise in the 
same way. Here we reach the central nerve of 
Augustine's reasoning. For if the human spirit, 
fashioned after the likeness of God, reaches self- 
consciousness only through the cooperation of these 
three functions, is there not good reason for think- 
ing that the Infinite Spirit likewise realizes him- 
self in an analogous way ? that the trinity of hy- 
postases is in fact the indispensable condition of 
the divine self-consciousness ? ^ 

This analogical argument was also employed by 
Anselm and others of the Scholastics, but, so far 
as I know, not materially improved. Melancthon's 
version of it is of special interest, because it en- 
deavors to point out clearly (whether tenably, is 
another question) the hitherto unindicated connec- 
tion between the objective thought of the divine 

^ Cf . A. Dorner, Augustinus, p. 5 ff. 



254 THE BEIXG OF GOD 

intellect and the hvpostatic distinction in the di- 
vine nature. I quote his own words : ^ '* There 
are two properties of the soul, — understanding 
and will. The ujiderstanding begets images by 
thinking ; the will possesses impulsive force, as 
when the heart begets high courage, feels love, 
gladness, or other affections." " Since the Son 
may be called Logos, he is begotten by thinking ; 
but a thought is an imao:e of the thino; thoug^ht : 
the Logos is therefore called Son because the Son 
is the image of the Father. But the Holy Spirit 
is said to ' proceed,' because love belongs to the 
will. The Father, therefore, beholding the Son, 
desires and loves him ; and the Son, in turn, be- 
holding the Father, desires and loves him : through 
this mutual love, properly an act of will, the Holy 
Spirit, who is the exciter of motion, proceeds from 
the Father and the Son. the coeternal imasre of the 
Father. Therefore, as * begetting ' is attributed to 
the understanding, so we say that ' procession ' is 
from the will, because the will is the seat of love 
and motion. Now in us there is no transfusion 
of our essence into any images, or into any love or 
impulse, even though our nature be vehemently 
carried away by love or gladness, and transports 

1 See T-westen. Dogmatik. ii. 208. Twesten's instructive discus- 
sion of tte Trinity may be found translated in the Bibliotheca 
Sacra for 1S46. 



MELANCTHON'S ABGUMENT 255 

itself, so to speak, into the beloved object. But 
the image of the eternal Father, which is the Son, 
is of the substance of the eternal Father, and the 
essence of the Father and the Son is communicated 
to the Holy Spirit." 

In the last two sentences of the foregoing, Me- 
lancthon meets the objection which inevitably pre- 
sents itseK, that the image which we project is one 
of pure thought, evanescent and without real exist- 
ence, by asserting a transfusion or communication 
of the divine essence by the Father, which, if ad- 
mitted, would certainly reintroduce the subordina- 
tionism of which Augustine freed the doctrine.^ 
Whether a better way of perfecting the analogy 
can be suggested, will be considered anon. At 
this point, it is more to the purpose to note another 
defect. You have observed that the analogy, as 
proposed by both Augustine and Melancthon, sets 
out with an analysis of the human self-conscious- 
ness, — that is, it views the mind as turned in upon 
itself, and in thought constructing an image or pic- 
ture of itself ; that done, it abandons the self -con- 
sciousness, and introduces the will, or love, to fur- 
nish the third side needed. But thereby it leaves 
the analogy incomplete, and gives up whatever 
demonstrative value it might have had. For it is 
evident that will or love (that is, in this case, self- 

1 Cf. above, p. 239, and Dorner's Augustinus, p. 28 £E. 



256 THE BEING OF GOD 

love), being an utterance of already established 
self-consciousness, cannot be invoked for its origi- 
nation. It presupposes it. 

These weak points discovered, many more recent 
theologians have endeavored so to construct the 
analogy as to avoid them. I shall endeavor to pre- 
sent it in the nev^er form as briefly and clearly as 
I may. The chief difficulty of the undertaking 
lies in the psychological analysis which it involves. 

Let us first ask how we come to fuU self-con- 
sciousness, — to the full sense of personality, and 
what that involves. And that means much more 
than if I were to ask. How do we know that we are 
not other persons, nor stones or trees, — that there 
is something we call " self " in us, and many not- 
selves outside of us ? It means. How do we come 
to know what the self in us is and contains, what 
it can do and feel, — in short, what its nature and 
powers are ? Self-consciousness — the knowledge 
of self — goes much farther than the mere con- 
sciousness that there is a self or me. The infant 
becomes cognizant of the not-me as soon as it be- 
gins to notice things, and to reach out after them ; 
and in that perception of the not-me there is in- 
cluded, as its opposite, the perception of the me 
as different from the not-me. But this is by no 
means true self-consciousness. It is only a first ap- 
proach towards it, such as brutes also have. They, 



RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 257 

too, perceive a difference between tliemselves and 
things not themselves. Clear self-consciousness 
requires the power of reflection, which brutes have 
not, or in low degree. The child has it, and in 
proportion to the use it makes of it advances 
toward true self-consciousness. But even in the 
brightest child the knowledge of its own personal- 
ity is next to nothing. It has will enough of a 
kind, but it is the instinctive impulse of an animal. 
Of its true self it is yet ignorant. In hosts of 
men self-consciousness is never fully developed, not 
even for an instant ; and in none, though possibly 
reached at intervals, is it permanently and unin- 
terruptedly held. The finite spirit cannot realize 
itself without losing the external world, on which, 
in its incorporate form, it depends for existence. 

Let us next trace the process by which self-con- 
sciousness is developed. Two steps are necessary. 
The first has already been described to us by Au- 
gustine and Melancthon. Prior to it^ the mind 
must be conceived as being in a state of what we 
may call nature-automatism. Its action differs in 
no respect from that of the brute mind. But as 
human mind it has in it, what the brute mind has 
not, the power to attain personality, and the latent 
impulse to enter on the road towards that attain- 
ment. How it is that the latent impulse starts 
into action, we cannot know, but the result is mat- 



258 THE BEING OF GOD 

ter of experience. The mind awakes, so to speak, 
to a premonition of its personality. It turns its 
eye in upon itself, and views its own inner world, 
— observes its powers of thought, will, and feeling ; 
discovers the springs of their action and notes 
their capabilities and limitations, — in short, forms 
an image, a thought-photograph, of itself. Is self- 
consciousness now attained ? By no means. We 
have the percipient mind, and we have the per- 
ceived image of itself on which it gazes. But as 
yet the two stand over against each other like 
strangers. Something must come and tell the per- 
cipient mind that the image it gazes on is or de- 
picts its own self. And of course that something 
must come from within the mind itself ; in other 
words, it must be the mind itself in another rela- 
tion to the image than that in which it formed it. 
It must be able to view both the self-inspecting 
mind and the image it projects as objects,, and to 
pronounce upon the relation between them. Such 
a diremption of the mind, mysterious as it is,, is 
not only necessary to explain self -consciousness, 
but seems to come to light in multitudes of abnor- 
mal psychological phenomena, which tend to put 
its possibility beyond question. Therefore, to re- 
state the whole process in few words, the mind, in 
the first place, as subject, creates by self -inspection 
an objective image of itself ; and then, by a second 



ANALOGOUS PEOCESS IN GOD 259 

act, recognizes itself in the image, and thus arrives 
at clear self-consciousness. 

It is probable that most persons, not familiar 
with psychological inquiries, would object that, 
while not aware of any marked deficiency of self- 
consciousness, they never made any such sudden 
and wonderful attainment of it as I have described. 
And they would be right. What I have described 
as if it were a single event in the life of the soul, 
is in fact the outcome of innumerable partial events 
of the same nature, but not of the same intensity, 
all tending to the same great result. We have 
grown each of us, almost imperceptibly, into that 
stage of true, self-conscious personality at which 
we have arrived. Our self-consciousness, as a pres- 
ent, realized possession, is constantly fluctuating ; 
but in the moments of its highest realization, could 
we analyze it, it would be found to present the 
movements pointed out. 

Now, as God is the perfect self-conscious Spirit, 
are we not justified in concluding that an analogous 
process takes place in him ? and that, as he is ab- 
solutely free from the limitations of time, growth, 
and imperfection of every kind, it takes place in 
him eternally and uninterruptedly ? We have, 
then, an analogy which tells of a ceaseless move- 
ment within the Divine Being by which his self- 
consciousness is produced and maintained. But 



260 THE BEING OF GOD 

how are we to conceive of this ? In us, the image 
of itself projected by the mind in thought is not 
indeed pure image, mere shadow (for thought can- 
not be wholly devoid of the life that begets it), 
but neither is it the adequate representation or 
counterpart of the spirit. It is only partially com- 
plete. The human spirit can neither fathom itself 
entirely, so as to project itself wholly into the im- 
age, nor can it completely separate the image from 
itself, so as to give it a real existence of its own.^ 
Hence our self-consciousness is never absolutely 
full ; and there is always in it a trace or remnant 
of the impersonal nature-life which precedes it. 
But no such disability attaches to God. He is In- 
finite Life, — Perfect Spirit. In him the process 
must reach its ideal character. The objective self- 
projection must be exhaustive, and the diremption 
must be complete. That in which perfect deity is 
to recognize itself must be perfect deity, — in fact 
as well as form. Nor is it difficult to apprehend, 
proximately at least, how this can be, provided we 
have firmly grasped the idea that God's thinking- 
is not, like ours, merely descriptive of an already 
existing object, but an outflow of life, giving real- 
ity to what it thinks. 

If, then, God, as the Divine Essence (the £J7is 
Dimnum^ let us say, for the sake of clearness), 

^ Cf . Dorner, Glaubenslekre, i. 407. 



DIVINE SELF-DIREMPTION 261 

be conceived as eternally objectifying himself in 
thought, and that thought as eternally realized in 
a living mode or form of the Divine Being, we have 
reached the conception of God eternally generating 
the Son, " the image of God," " the impress of his 
substance " (2 Cor. iv. 4 ; Heb. i. 3). Observe, I 
said not, God as Father, but God as the (per hy- 
'pothesin undifferentiated) Ens Dwinum ; for, in 
the logical order of thought, the Father as Father 
comes into being only with the Son. Father and 
Son are both subsistence-forms, modes of being 
(rpoTToi V7rap^€(j09, Seinsweisen) of the one Ens Di- 
vinum. But you may ask, How can the Ens Divi- 
num^ prior to the attainment of self-consciousness, 
objectify himself in thought ? in other words, how 
can he, not being self-conscious, think himself? 
But the same question may be asked in the case of 
every human being. How does the human spirit, 
in order to reach self-consciousness, project itself 
as another than itself ? The only possible an- 
swer is that it is inherent in the nature of spirit 
so to do. I might remind you that in dreams and 
trances thinking goes on, as showing that thought 
does not presuppose self-consciousness. But the 
physical quantity comes in there, and is none the 
less disturbing because it is unknown. I keep my 
stand, therefore, back of the physical, and say that 
as the physical cannot originate thought (however 



262 THE BEING OF GOD 

it may modify it), thought, or, if you please, the 
thought-process, must exist prior to it, and be an 
ever-active attribute of spirit as spirit. And as 
the eternal Spirit is tbe source of all finite spirit, 
whatever is in the latter must be present in the 
former, this never-resting impulse to objectify it- 
self in thought included. Therefore in the Infi- 
nite Spirit this self - positing process is not only 
present, but is as beginningiess as the being in 
whom it takes place. 

"What we have reached, then, is the conception 
of the £Jns Diviiium eternally dirempting itself 
into the twofold relation of thinking subject and 
thought object, or, as the Christian doctrine ex- 
presses it, the relation of Father and Son. All 
there is in the one is in the other ; for the thinker 
forever thinks himself completely. And as the 
thinking is effective, real, the object is pervaded 
by the same life and movement as the subject. 
Therefore each can contemplate the other as if 
(to resort to an illustration which, however defec- 
tive, may be helpful) the reflection in a mirror 
were endowed with life and power to contemplate 
the face of which it is the reflection. But this 
mutual contemplation cannot make the one find 
itself in the other. In and of itself, it can only 
emphasize the diversity. For subject and object 
(Father and Son), as such, are two, and, in the 



DIVINE SELF-RETURN 263 

sense in which they are two, are not and cannot be 
identical. They are distinct modes of existence 
of the one Divine Being. But by another move- 
ment the Ens Divinum^ which is in or under each 
of these modes, and in both has the same qualities 
and impulses, sets out simultaneously from each, 
and in meeting recognizes itself in itself, and 
thereby (so to speak) closes the circle and estab- 
lishes self-consciousness. Herewith we reach that 
third mode of being in the Deity which Christian 
doctrine describes as the Holy Spirit " proceeding " 
from the Father and the Son. 

We have thus found three relations or modes of 
being in God. Neither the relations themselves 
nor their number have been arbitrarily determined ; 
both have been deduced from what we know of the 
nature of spirit. We have found personal charac- 
teristics in the relations, yet (as before explained) 
they are not persons in the strict and proper sense 
of the word. The consciousness in each of them 
is the consciousness of the one Divine Being. 
Without them, however, God cannot be thought 
by us as self-conscious Personality, but only as un- 
conscious or sub-conscious pure being, after a pan- 
theistic manner. Deism, the only other alterna- 
tive, is in the last analysis a mere refusal to think 
Him at all. From the philosophical point of view, 
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the doc- 



264 THE BEING OF GOD 

trine that the Eternal can be and is Self-conscious, 
Personal Life, — Life infinite and absolute, eter- 
nally going forth and returning within himself ; 
and therefore eternally knowing, eternally loving, 
eternally blessed. The internal process, out of 
which the divine self-consciousness issues, is with- 
out beginning and without end. There never was a 
time when Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were not, 
or when God was other than he is.^ 

The argument now finished takes its departure 
from the constitution of the human mind, and rea- 
sons up to God. There are others, starting from 
ethical principles, which it would be interesting to 
pursue, did time allow. One of them only I can- 
not bring myself to pass unnoticed, chiefly because 
it illustrates, in a striking way, the difference of 
function pertaining to the distinctions within the 
Trinity to which I before referred. Whether it is 
wholly original with Dorner, that greatest of mod- 
ern theologians, I cannot say, but it is certainly 
only in his work that it has arrested my attention.^ 
It sets out from the fact that, in seeking for the 
ultimate authority of moral truth, we arrive at a 

^ For another statement of what is essentially the same ar- 
g-ument as the above, see Kedney, Chris. Doct. Harmonized, i. 
97-102. 

^ See Glaubenslehre, i. 409 ff. 



ETHICAL ARGUMENTS 265 

contradiction or antinomy which nothing but the 
doctrine of the Trinity resolves. 

You will remember that in previous lectures the 
final ground of truth was incidentally adverted to, 
in connection with the moral nature of man and 
the attribute of divine omnipotence.^ The diffi- 
culty takes its rise in connection with moral truth, 

— the distinction between right and wrong. The 
question is. What makes right right, and wrong 
wrong ? Only two answers are possible : Right, 
moral truth, is either the result of the divine will, 

— a mandate. This shall be moral, that shall be 
immoral, — or it is rooted and grounded in the 
divine nature, and therefore necessary, eternally 
unalterable even for God. There is no third alter- 
native ; for if you conceive of something outside of 
God as the determining power, that something, 
call it fate or any other name, would be, if not God, 
superior to God. Now assume that moral truth is 
the creature of God's will, — that right is right 
because God has so willed, and that he might have 
willed otherwise, — what follows ? We get a God 
who, prior to this act of will, was morally unde- 
termined. He was all life and all power and all 
knowledge, but he had no moral character. In 
vain should we seek to escape from this by saying 
that his will was grounded in his character; for 

1 Above, pp. 64 and 137. 



266 THE BEING OF GOD 

that would be to abandon the assumed position, 
and to imply that moral truth is necessary even 
for God, — that, though he willed, his will was the 
outcome of his nature, and could not be other than 
it was. If right is right simply because God 
willed it, it is a purely arbitrary matter, and the 
whole universe is a gigantic instance of might mak- 
ing right ! 

That cannot be. Therefore we turn to the other 
alternative, and say that God is and always was 
morally determined, and that therefore moral 
truth is what it is by a necessity inherent in God 
himself. God cannot change it in the least. It is 
impossible for him, even in his own actions, to 
deviate from the right by a hair's-breadth, — im- 
possible, not morally merely, but physically. God 
is, not by choice only, but by nature, incapable 
of doing wrong. In this way we should secure 
God's formal righteousness, no doubt, but at the 
expense of his freedom. Such righteousness in 
men we should refuse to acknowledge as genuine. 
It would be the morality of an automaton, — the 
goodness of a clock that faithfully serves its owner 
by accurate time-keeping. True morality is a free 
morality. That is what St. Paul meant by his 
contrast between the works of the law and the 
works of the Spirit of freedom. We cannot for 
a moment suppose that that is wanting in God 



ETHICAL ARGUMENTS 267 

which it was the very end of his man-becoming in 
Christ to impart to us. 

Here there are two contradictories, both of which 
must nevertheless be true. God must be unchange- 
ably morally determined, and he must also be per- 
fectly free to will or not to will that which he finds 
in himself. The problem is as old as Plato, and 
as fateful as human existence. It lies at the base 
of all the serious dogmatic and practical life aber- 
rations of both mediaeval and modern days. Its 
solution, if anywhere to be found, is found in the 
doctrine of the Trinity. That doctrine affords at 
least a hint of the direction in which we are to look 
for light. For though it by no means renders the 
depths of Deity transparent to finite gaze, it re- 
veals distinctions in God which suggest explana- 
tion of the coexistence in him of necessity and free- 
dom, while at the same time it enables us to see 
why, before Christianity, not an inkling of this 
solution could be obtained. The God of the old 
revelation was the God of moral law, and its inex- 
orable guardian. Sin was transgression of exter- 
nal law, and righteousness unquestioning submis- 
sion to authority. In this the moral necessity of 
the divine nature, as centred in the Father, comes 
to view. But the Son of the Christian revelation 
presents the converse side of perfectly free willing 
of the right. Christ is the obedient, the sinless 



268 THE BEING OF GOD 

obedient, the free, energetically co- willing obedient. 
Finally, in the Holy Spirit the Cliristian conscious- 
ness recognizes a divine power which works the 
union of the two — authority and freedom — in 
the human indi^adual. Now, that which in revela- 
tion thus intimates the coexistence in God of moral 
necessity, moral freedom, and their union, must 
correspond to facts within the divine nature ; and 
the eternal process in which the one God unfolds 
himself into three modes of existence, or centres of 
consciousness, gives us at least a dim perception 
of truths so far beyond our comprehension. 

Arguments similar to the preceding might be 
multiplied. They are suggested by every moral 
attribute of God. It is possible to overrate their 
value. They are certainly not of such a nature as 
to render service in popular instruction. But it 
is no less easy to undervalue them. If they can- 
not wholly satisfy the thirst of the mind to know 
what it believes, they hold out possibilities, yea 
prospects, of knowledge, when that which is in part 
shall have passed away, that cannot fail to animate 
the Christian life. But this is not their chief 
value. They all show that every question in ethics 
and theology, in philosophy and psychology, leads 
back to God, and that our idea of God receives its 
highest perfection from the light thrown on it by 



ETHICAL ABGUMENTS 269 

the doctrine of the Trinity. This doctrine is the 
priceless contribution which Christianity, consid- 
ered as a system of thought, has made to human 
philosophy. It is the solvent of innumerable diffi- 
culties that present themselves to the thinker. 
Without it, theism — that is, the doctrine of a liv- 
ing, personal, transcendent, yet immanent deity — 
cannot successfully maintain itself, but must inevi- 
tably give way to some form of pantheism. 



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